Linux for the Enterprise @ CMP

Andrew Dvorak wrote to us with Network Computing's take on Linux. Good chronicle of why Linux is moving into the higher end markets, and the huge surge of support that has been seen in the last six months.

Comments

That's not what the report said...

[???]

The report only shows (claims?) that Mac OS X running Apache is faster than Solaris running Netscape Enterprise or NT running IIS.

I would suggest that this test shows nothing more than the relative speeds of Apache, IIS and Netscape Enterprise. If one wanted relevant speed comparisons for the OS's, one would most certainly hold the server as a control variable - that is to say that each of the machines would be running Apache.

Further, the Solaris test is an example of very poor science - a dual 200MHz SPARC is not necessarily comparable to a PII 400 MHz Intel or G3. You can't just multiply processor speed by number of processors.

Even worse, the "report" makes no mention whatsoever of configuration of the servers, the setup of the client machines, or any other variables that one would expect any HONEST test would control.

The only thing made clear in the test "report" is that this test says NOTHING about Linux's performance.

Clustering

[hypnotik]

Overall a excellent article, with one minor exception.

The author seems to equate Beowulfs with high availability clusters. Beowulf clusters are for high computational processing, not for high availability processes.