Slashdot Mirror
Quantifying "Bandwidth is the Limiter"
John Lazzaro writes "Found this linked from Dave Winers site, an
analysis that puts numbers behind the oft
quoted "Linux + Apache will saturate any
reasonable Internet link given static pages" It basically
assumes the mindcraft tests are accurate, and then tells you
what it means. Most interesting is the comments about
MSs online tech support, the hardware they use, the results
of the benchmarks, and the fact that static content is
practically irrelevant.
The reason these test shock us is because we've seen with our own eyes what Linux can do to an aging 486 that we have laying around not being used. I don't know of any other OS that would run that well on that hardware with the exception of FreeBSD. Perhaps Linux doesn't scale as well as some other OSes, but that is no reason to say that it doesn't perform well.
This article technically does a good job showing that currently these benchmark tests are almost irrelevant. On the other hand, we must remember that in the future, we don't want Microsoft using the same article. In other words, if the Mindcraft tests had been reversed and Linux smoked NT, then maybe Microsoft would point out the same things and we would complain that it doesn't matter if it's useful currently or not. I say we take these results like this: NT has some better aspects to it than Linux right now (how could this not be?). Thus, instead of coming up with excuses, we should just work hard in making Linux equal or better to it and ignore fighting Microsoft with just words. Action is the way to show 'em our beliefs.
Ummmm.... you don't read do you.
Since when does fully available on > 5 T1's or a T3 mean *low* performance??
This analysis was meant to show that even if NT did win in raw performance (a point most of us concded given the new tests), the *real-world* performance of Linux is still far more than adequate for all but the biggest sites. In which case you would use a 'real' *nix on a far bigger box.
As the author mentions, tests on static pages really have no meaning these days. I'd be interested in seeing the numbers on ASP/dynamic pages... that would be a better benchmark...
One question for you though, AC... do you work for M$? Aren't you happy to have your troll as the first comment on this item? =P
SuperDuck =)
not anonymous, just behind a firewall
ragnar@interlog.com
One question for you though, AC... do you work for M$?
no, i work for a large portal that produces a huge number of static pages.
anyone who says static pages are irrelevent is not a professional web developer.
While the web serving benchmark might not matter since a real site is limited by bandwidth, the file serving benchmark that linux lost does matter since multiple fast ethernet connections are common for many LANs.
Anyone who thinks static content on the web is irrelevant has no clue what they are talking about.
Generating static pages where possible is the number 1 best way to crank up site performance.
Whenever I see someone using PHP or ASP to generate static content, the bozo bit gets flipped.
While the Microsoft Marketing Gurus duke it out with the Linux Devotees about whether a benchmark(which are notoriously irrelevant) is accurate people forget that the war against Microsoft has moved beyond marketing. No longer is Linux dependent on consumer acceptance.
WE ALREADY HAVE IT.
IBM, Compaq, Dell, and others have already created or announced systems that come with preinstalled with Linux. These huge corporations don't make decisions based on a few benchmarks.
These companies have other strategic reasons for what they do. Linux is not leading the Unix publicity pack because of its performance, but because of the perceived future value.
Linux is the fountainhead of Open Source...and not only that, its also a piece of software at the very heart of computers everywhere--the operating system.
Hardware manufacturers have come to the conclusion that they don't like it when competing companies(read Microsoft) have them by the gonads. So, because Microsoft can't play nice, they entire computer manufacturing community has decided to rid themselves of the Windows liability.
And of course, the software community has jumped on the bandwagon because Micrsoft poses a direct threat to their markets.
Linux will win through strategic importance, NOT through technical superiority.
See this c't test for some realistic IIS / Apache results:
http://www.heise.de/ct/english//99/13/186-1/
My God, linux users are really pulling out the stops to mincr, re-mince, and doubly re-mince the results of these performance tests.
/., even in the article you bash). Practicality? At least they know what to work with. You bash that; I see it as a strength.
/.? Hell no. iow, I'm sure an NT person probably thought "So? Big whoop. Bandwidth is the main thing. I use NT because of X, Y, or Z." But they didn't write something up.
Yes, the community is pretty known for thinking outside the lines of accepted views. Why does this surprise you? If you spend any time in the "linux users" community, you'd realize this.
Linux has always been about practicality and performance. They lost on performance, which the community has admitted to numerous times (twice now on
The point is there: benchmarks suck. Even if this benchmark is legit, it's got problems due to a very legit bottleneck. You want to ignore that, go ahead. There are other areas you'd do better at attacking if you really have a problem with Linux (e.g. the desktop, overall throughput, etc.)
I don't think they'd be so critical of the numbers and methodology had linux come out on top.
Duh. If Linux had come out on top, all the NT advocates would be doing that (yes, they exist although they don't quite bond with each other, probably because they're too busy trying to keep their machines up). Linux users wouldn't need to bother.
Your statement is the equivalent of saying, "Since a pro-Linux person wrote this, the facts are irrelevant. I don't care about the truth or looking at other perspectives that may be accurate." Close-minded, imnsho.
Plus, I wouldn't be so sure about your statement. Now, would such a thought have been thoughtfully written up and analyzed, and then someone have found it to submit it as an article to
Oh, who am I? You've probably written me off as a Linux advocate. Think again. From the computer realm, I'm actually a very ethusiastic mac advocate (yes, one of those) and have taken a liking to the free BSDs, esp. OpenBSD.
Who are you? My assumption is that you don't work for MS. I give MS a fair amount of credit of picking people who can think, although not innovate or seek Truth. You've shown you can't think too well, although you certainly shown you don't seek Truth.
From this link
a res/NtLinux.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/NTServer/nts/exec/comp
It looks like microsoft is saying that NT using ISAPI is 650% faster than linux using CGI. They
didn't even test the apache api, but instead
provided an N/A bar for linux next to the ISAPI
bar. How's that for sleazy.
It is much easier to measure the endpoints of a system than the middle- by testing with unlimited bandwith, they are trying to approximate what happens when a user accesses a server. A faster response time does translate to a faster loading page. Loading a page is a chain of events that depends on several things- the speed of the client, connection speed, as well as the speed of the server. With a faster response from the sever, the page will load faster, even if the connection is not saturated.
If people are unhappy with my assumption that total bandwith response is related to partial load response time, then someone should come up with a benchmark to test this.
That's not a very realistic benchmark. I run a small-time (1.2M hits/month) website with 75 pages. 95% of my hits are to one of 6 pages.
Not that I'm saying Microsoft's benchmark is meaningful (if as I suspect it's just fetching the *same page* over and over again it's completely meaningless) - but that random/10E6 pages benchmark isn't relevant to most web sites.
Anyway thanks for the info. Now I have something I can print out for the big boss...
Personally, I would like to see a benchmark of Apache + mod_Perl vs. Apache + PHP vs IIS + ASP or something.
The dynamic benchmarks should be more important to most...
Maybe Rob could tell us what he is running for the SlashDot site?
But now they have focussed our attention well and truly on this issue. The full blowtorch of our gaze has turned on this one small portion of Linux behavior. Doesn't perform the best under all conditions, you say? Oh, well then.
They wanted a fight, and now they'll get one, I'll wager. I am predicting that in six months, they'll be wishing they had kept their fool mouths shut.
Poor bastards. Pity them.
Last 1.5 year, Linux has been extremely hip. Something along the lines of "young finnish hacker together with thousands of other hackers from all over the world make a mean, lean OS that kicks Windows ass". This is CNN, NY slime material. Now imagine CNN posting stuff like "although Linux did lose NT in raw static pages performance, that doesn't matter cause 1,3k hits per second amount to .. Not to mention stability, maintainability, remote management.." Not CNN material. MS knows how to fight..
:)
Of course these benchmarks still mean nothing from technical standpoint.
I predict that Linux won't be nearly as hip anymore. That's bad cause it was giving Linux alot of edge in capturing market.
I suggest maintaining the following course of action:
1. Use technical information to promote Linux in technical-oriented circles.
2. Work on benchmark performance, for a snappy comeback in a few months or a year.
That's why I'm studying C now
- Rainy
Here is an interesting (informal) test that includes lots of dynamic content generation mechanisms.
Yes, linux (2.0.36 anyway) uses slow start, there are a bunch of network tweaks, I wonder how many were actually used in the test. Is there a list of what was actually tweaked available?
> NT admins think rebooting a box 3 times a week
> is just a part of standard maintenance, to "put
> out fires".
Ah, give me a break! You sound as pathetic as the Mac weenies who constantly try to claim that you need a PhD in cs to run a PC.
NT Boxes don't crash often at all unless you have shitty hardware. If you have memory timing problems you'll get bluescreens every once in a while. But on such machines I've gottne the same thing under Linux.
On good hardware my NT servers run 24 hours a day for months and years. The only times I've had crashes is when _I_ do something bad or when I install new software that is buggy. Done properly (meaning don't install all the latest and greatest all the time) it's as solid as the old Netware and as Linux.
There are plenty of reasons to use Linux - let's not discredit ourselves by making up false ones. No one will listen to anything you say if you continute to spout stupid misinformation.
hitchhiker
See the slashdot 'code' page. It has some old snapshots for the code that generates the page.
./script.pl > page.html .
Basically, it's Apache + mod_perl running on a dual Pentium, with the static pages generated by cron via
Just curious as to why no one has mentioned the slashdot effect. I seem to recall many NT servers being brought to their knees when linked from /. Yet, there is one site out their that is serving up all the links to these sites that are being crashed.... hmmm, slashdot. And I would venture to say slashdot is anything but static.
Just my 2 cents... I am looking forward to all of the improvements that will come from this comparision.
Hmmm, why aren't we using NT for Hotmail then?
Can't handle all those hits. Well multiple machines should be able to handle it, right!
Guess not though. Seems a little strange.
Now is the chance for Open Source to show its stuff. Microsoft is using its marketing dept (again) to fight its battles and is winning with the "I write about computers, but can't program my way out of a paper bag and by the way how do I set my screen saver like yours crowd".
If the Open Source community can out engineer them then this war will be won!
... it's just one of many things to consider when choosing the OS to run on your webserver. How does NT stack up against Linux on security, remote and local administration, standards compliance, total cost of hardware/software/support, hardware support, stability, etc., etc.
My point is that so what if NT is faster than Linux. The speed of the server is only one criteria among many that one should be concerned about when choosing a server. NT will be the choice of some, Linux for others, and numerous other OSes for the rest.
Why does Linux need to win through technical superiority? Microsoft didn't.
Oooh.. that would be fun to play with. Put a couple RC5 clients, Seti@Home, that large prime number finding program....
The point was that static pages don't matter in *benchmarks* because it's obvious that the computer is not the limiting factor in serving these kinds of pages.
Now a test in dynamic content would be something entirely different as it puts more of a strain on processing power and the OS itself to produce the page to serve.
Linux isn't only more stable it's faster too, but not (yet) with 4 NIC's.
There is one thing to note...redhat is the slowest performing version of linux. Also one other thing to note is the...you can use the no_nagle script or compile the kernel to run apache (or any other tcp program) to get a 10-to-1 increase over normal in linux. I am sure the microsoft box was tuned to the hilt...but I doubt they linux box was. With no_nagle on linux will kill a ms windows 95/98/NT box on a local lan dead from too fast a tcp transfer...so I dont use that on local lan applications where windows in involved.
:).
Another thing to note...apache was not running threaded on the linux box...cause if it were this would not have been so close...
With 4 CPUs and 1 Gig of RAM, Linux & Apache achieved 1,842 http requests per second.
With 1 CPU and 256 MB RAM, Linux & Apache achieved 1,314 http requests per second.
Obviously the kernel ran on one of the 4 cpus and apache still ran on one!
its too bad though that most people wont think about it...and its also too bad that linux was in a smp test with a non-smp application! If linux were tuned right...which redhat has no clue about trust me...the nt machine would have been showing its inferior nature. Another thing to note is MS IIs sever go down and up as often as ebay...in fact I think they use NT
I personally wouldn't have posted any reply to this article if Linux had won, because I've always known it was faster than NT ;-)
Apache requires a seperate process for every connection (unless this has changed recently). If those connections are downloading SLOWLY, Apache will be forced to spawn additional processes, and you'll start losing memory quickly. This situation would become a nasty limiting factor for Apache.
The whole "pre-forked process" thing in Apache stinks. But, Apache still kicks IIS's butt for configurability and usability in real-world situations.
In order for Joe Sixpack (i.e. your PHB) to understand that Linux really is a better proposition, Linux has to beat or at least match NT's performance in every single test, even the canned and artificial ones that Mindcraft performed.
So instead of demonstrating it is a basically invalid test (let's face it, nearly all benchmarks are) let's kick their ass next time.
Dude, what part of marketing is it that you don't understand? Nothing that is used to promote any product, and I mean ANY product, is completely true. It's called 'spin' and you're going to have to get used to it because it's always going to exist.
"Hmm.. Internet server is diffrent than Intranet server. And, in such a case, I think it's also important
to go back to some SAMBA studies. "
Agreed, but these tests used data sets small enough to fit in the server's cache (even on the 256MB test). This just doesn't seem realistic to me.
Static content is what the web is made almost entirely of. If it doesn't matter, the web doesn't matter. That said, none of this matters until/unless bandwidth increases dramtically. It was nice to see the false claims of Linux speed deflated, though.
...and who wants to write the rest of it?
Take the 4 processor system they used... On the Linux box, say your are running cgi's for some of your content which will take up 10% of the cpu. According to my math that leaves the system with about 1,658 hits/second left. Now on the NT side, they could run up to 60% usage and still serve the same amount of static pages. Put Linux's CGIs up to 50% and NT is allowed 78% usage.
... then they fight you. Then you win.
I think these benchmarketing schemes will be blowing up in Microsoft's face here real soon. In a matter of months the Linux kernel, the IP stack, Apache and whatever other code that is critical to these tests will be tweaked and optimized to the point that Microsoft will no longer mention benchmarks. Microsoft will move on to pointing out something such as ease of administration, MS Office integration, or hardware compatibility. Then the GNU coders will focus on what MS is focusing on to close the gap. Unfortunately during this time the MS marketing machine is showing the PHB's that Linux is inferior. This couuld go on for years before Microsoft runs out of reasons that NT is superior.
Oh well, world domination can wait until next year.
Yes, yes... but he is just an educated person complaining about how messed up the computer industry is. That is why I read Scientific American and not PC Computing.
Benchmarks aren'nt going to change, but it makes anyone who is in the computer field and has taken some stitistics cry. and so they should.
Excellent comment! But just for the sake of clarity:
p.s.: it should have been 10^4 and 10^6 or 1.0E4 and 1.0E6..
E means Exponent, ie same ^, in other words it was right (correct me if I am wrong) to say: 10^4=10e4, effectively saying 10e4 is 1.0*10e4. Not that it makes the difference, just I would not mind to know if I am right or wrong.
I know that the Mindcraft test primarily measured throughput. Anyone working on a test that measures latency? It irks me when web servers and file servers take a long time to respond to my request.
exactly.
Thank you for posting this. A lot of Americans cannot read the European press due first to lack of a second language and second due to availability. Sadly, both with me (not too many benchmarks are published in Latin).
Good point, but you missed! Having excess usage implies that cpu cycles will be useful for other tasks. If there are are no other tasks for the dedicated web-server machine that will not be useful. The network pipe is already full, no more network-traffic tasks. You have to show that the new cpu-bound jobs will not affect the performance of the network jobs. Must show (with benchmarks) all the two classes of jobs are independent to each other and not correlated. We can not just assume that the new tasks will not affect the performance of the network-related tasks. Since you propose that lower cpu usage there are extra benefits to be harvested, you also have the burden of proof.
Use only free software. Haven't you heard the revolution has started?
Unless I missed something, the configuration was done in house. Having reps from specific companies would be the way to go. Of course neither Microsoft or Redhat is likely to release specifics: they both have their certified engineers to protect.
Another thing I saw is their client program does not use keep-alives. Any site not supporting these is just crazy. I noticed images.slashdot.org supports them, but with a limit of 5 requests and a timeout of 5 seconds. That may be fine for a local ethernet but the connection is going to close a couple of times on a dialup user like me. It is a FreeBSD box so it could run RFC 1323 or 1644 for even more speed. Linux 2.2.x has 1323 extensions on by default I think.
Benchmarking isn't designed for us, it's designed for people that either
A) flunked out of engineering and went to business school
B) started in business school.
Imagine how a doctor must feel when he (or she) see's a commercial about "Zyban" and the wonders of "Zyban" and how you should ask your doctor about incredible "Zyban" with no mention of what the hell "Zyban" is or what it treats or who it's for. When your poor doctor is asked about it, that same doctor will have to learn about it or look like a schmuck.
Well Linux was beaten by NT in some sort of bullshit test, marketing will ask you about it and then you'll have to learn about the test, realize that it used static content, and that your site will never get that many hits anyhow. When poor your hears about it, you will will have to learn about it or you will look like a schmuck.
My only complaint is that tests like these waste my time. Lament all you will but look on the bright side, you can always contract and get paid by the hour on the more time that is wasted by idiot benchmark tests, the bigger a paycheck you will have at the end of the week.
Way to go MS!
On my PPro, kernel 2.2.10, apache 1.3.6, and slightly loaded with rc5des and other things, I notice a big improvement with keep alives. Apache is set to allow up to 100 keep alive requests with a 15 second timeout. test.exe is a 10k file made with the help of dd.
Running 'ab -c 5 -t 30 http://localhost/test.exe' does 269 requests/sec. If I add -k, it goes to 434! I consider this a serious oversight in their benchmarks.
Certainly indicative of a bad device driver.
But do you really think the vast majority of NT boxes can't be installed with bluescreening?
Have you ever even tried to install NT?
Every single desktop in my office runs NT, and none of them have *EVER* bluescreened in the past year.
Furthermore, Windows2000beta3 is on my desktop and it hasn't bluescreened since I installed it, except today for the first time when I foolishly installed a "leaked" beta driver for my TNT card and tried to play Quake3.
Serves me right for downloading a beta build that's not even publically released off of a warez site.
Looking at tcpdump, I see ACKs and data exchanged at almost exactly the ping RTT time for that host. From this info., I would have to say NT does follow the spec. If you are really interested, load up Jugernaut in one xterm, tcpdump in the other, and get ready to type really really fast... [hehe] If someone knew what they were doing, it would be easy to write a little prog. to open a raw socket and watch the responses.
* SMS is not needed in Linux. There is no registry, so you don't need to do 'Special' installation for most programs. In fact, most of the time, installation is done implicitly by having a shared /usr partition. Cron works under Linux, so you don't need a special 'package manager'.
* MySQL doesn't come close in Buzzword-compliant features, but for simple DB back ends, it's perfect. And it doesn't require a DBA to administer, while NT SQL Server does.
* Exchange is terrible at groupware (get Lotus Notes). Linux is probably weak in the shared schedules..
* IIS vs apache has been discussed. To death.
The key here is that the average user is -- Average. They don't need the fastest software, just something that's fast-enough. There's no technical reason to optomize for benchmarks, just like there's no technical reson to have transactions with rollback on your guest book.
Amen. Hey, I've dealt for *years* with the ...
problems of MT servers like Netscape 2.x ff.
The day Apache goes MT based on phoney-baloney
benchmarks is the day I
step off stopping yellow line
stand on starting blue line
I don't know if this has been done before, but what about a more realistic server benchmark? Log all the hits a fairly busy site (something like Slashdot) gets during the course of a few days, and then feed them back into both computers, with the proper timing. It sounds like it'd show that both computers (at least at the hardware level that Mindcraft was using) did equally well with any load that name of your business here could throw at them, and that would be a good rebuttal to a boss waving this survey.
Watch tcpdump. It sends a single data packet and waits until the the ack comes back from the client.
Everything but the SIDS in the NT registry and writing to NTFS (ro at last check).
I'd love to get this working, I've boggled the mind of my NT admin doing this sort of thing in linux, but we're a 98% MS shop at work.
So what I'd like to do...
1) Put together a working NT/95 machine.
2) boot LRP w/ nfs or samba
3) tar the file system
4) walk to other machine, boot up w/ same disk
5) partition/ format/ write the drive from the network image
6) munge the sids number
7) tell IS people, here's the magic floppy, go forth and do likewise.
eric (if you hear of such a thing, email me eric-slashdot@soroos.net)
Of course the results can be true not because of NT's power but of the well done programming in IIS. Also I was stated before the fast servers do not always rely on Linux but on one of the free *BSD's. Why because Linux is always well tunned for it's job right after installation. Which is understandeble for a Unix-like Os that tries to be a crowd pleaser ( there is nothing wrong with that !) but the *BSD's are made purposly for networking and security and almost nothing else ( not true nowadays). So what I propose is to set up tree servers 1. NT 2. Linux 3. FreeBSD and have them host real sites(ftp,http, cgi...) and check their stats! While I now Linux will do very well I think FreeBSD will do better ( why would Yahoo, xoom.com and Hotmail use it?? and not Linux) because FreeBSD is the silent contender that exist but is not hyped. My faith rests in Linux and FreeBSD for I have both. But Linux is trying to hard to fulfill more than one task at the time. Akhar akhar@hotmail.com
His estimates are a little biased. He does not account for pages cached at the client or proxy. They usually take under 100 bytes regardless of the actual page size.
Apache does not cache files unless they are handled by mod_proxy. Also, all operating systems cache files in RAM. Cacheing at the application level is slightly stupid unless you know the file is going to be needed later on and don't want to risk the possibility of it removed to make room for other files. That creates more problems because the application can't tell if the file was changed unless it does a system call to check the timestamp. The kernel's cache knows when the file is changed because another process had to write to the file through the kernel. If you still insist on application level cacheing, how about application level TCP stacks?
The other increase involved was the addition of 3 processors. NT's TCP stack used all of those processors while Linux's stack is still single-threaded. This explains why even ultra-fast bare-bones web servers maxed out at roughly the same point as apache. I'm willing to bet Apache for Win32 will run faster on the 4 proc. system than Apache under Linux.
The word "should" kindof scares me... like "Your flight should stay in the air on Jan 1, 2000."
With regard to active content, I assume you are talking about embedding perl/php into the web server to avoid the performance hit of forking a CGI process. IIS calls their embedding ISAPI, if I remember correctly.
Dynamic content and squid is a funny thing. True dynamic results (based on user selection or something similar) are uncacheable. If you are dealing with pseudo-dynamic content (eg. Slashdot) which only really needs to be updated at specific intervals, the best way would be to generate static html which are updated automatically. Now you are back to serving static files.... FYI, Apache's mod_rewrite has great way to handle pseudo-dynamic content which is only generated if it is requested.
Of course Linux isn't being used to its full potential even by today's web servers. Apache itself doesn't do the right thing with threads, for example.
This kind of optimization has been slowed down by the limits in network bandwidth. At present, you saturate ten-megabit networks so easily that there's no reason to optimize more. The only way to not saturate ten-megabit networks is to have lots and lots of heavy duty CGIs. But that's not what the kernel can help with. What the kernel could potentially do is directly answer requests for static pages, and pass the more complicate requests to Apache. Once faster networking is more commonplace, this will be more intriguing. But right now we don't have the critical mass of hardware to test and develop it.
Has anyone done any similar benchmarks with OS's like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc? I wonder if how they would perform against Linux and NT.
Has anyone done any similar benchmarks with OS's like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc? I wonder how they would perform against Linux and NT.
... a sane analysis of these benchmark. Personnallly, I don't care much about Linux "losing" this benchmark. As far as I am concerned, Linux is good enough (performance-wise) for my application (serving 5-15 thousands hit of dynamic content a day).
Another aspect that have not seen discussed is the economical aspect. Let's do some more math :
Web server budget : 6000$ CDN
NT solution :
BackOffice : 3500 $ CDN
Hardware : 2500 $ CDN
Linux solution :
OS, database engine, developpement tool : free
Hardware : 6000$ CDN
These are real world number: that's my budget for a Web server I am setting up. With the added budget on hardware, I can afford a RAID controller, a second CPU, twice the memory, a good enclosure (redondant PS/fan) and a better UPS. Guess wich solution my boss choosed ?
So if my boss come to me with this benchmark in hand screaming for explanation, I won't hide under my desk. She speak $, so she'll have no problem understanding the issue.
I work for an NT house and from experience i can say that NT can be installed in less than 2 hours.
I have installed NT on a new system up to the point that office and pro-e work in one and a half hours. no less than 6 cdrom's are required. network install, what's that? what do you mean i don't need specialized drivers for each video card, ethernet card, sound card... but i like rebooting my machine each time i install something new.
the kickstart feature of RedHat is a godsent for manufacturers. I would love to be able to boot a floppy and come back in 2 hours to a complete system.
I guess that's why i convinced the owner to sell linux.
/* plug */
visit NTSI for high power ALPHA's running Linux.
For those of you wondering about that benchmark c't translated the article into English (although, not the graph labels, but those shouldn't be too hard to figure out ;) and posted it on their website here.
Basically, NT performs static content serving more efficiently and the Linux response is "yeah, but Linux is good enough"
99% of the time, the Linux crowd will complain about Windows apps being "bloated" and using lots of diskspace and ram even that the average PC comes with more RAM and Diskspace than even office2000 can saturate.
So, you have the Linux crowd arguing Linux is very efficient, but then real world tests show it isn't more efficient than NT at serving static content and the comment is "BUT BUT, that will saturate connections anyway!"
Did you ever think that if NT can handle 300% more requests per second than Linux, that it
doesn't waste as many server resources per each connection handled?
Face it: Linux doesn't scale as good as NT. Stop trying to downplay it.
Now, if you want to try it again with dynamic content, go ahead, but my best is that ISAPI/COM/ASP applications will SMOKE apache modules/php3/mod_perl.
What happens when Linux/Apache loses out in a dynamic benchmark?
Face the music people. The first step in recovery in admiting you have a problem.
Well, this is the deal -- testing to destruuction. Look at the benchmarks in the first place -- they showed us where Linux failed. So we can now fix those areas.
Ten years ago, V-rated car tires were just getting standard and people were talking about Z-ratings as being silly. I recall reading a really, really dumb editorial during the F1 season saying a number of things, but largely how setting up a tire to control an F1 car or a 230mph streamliner down the Mulsanne Straight (when it was still straight) was completely irrelevant to the development of high-efficiency tires to save our precious oil. Well, as time went on, those 190+mph tires led to completely different carcass construction, long chain carbon, fumed silica, better rubber, better dealing, better tread design, and so on -- these days a typical 113mph tire gets about produces about 60% less drag for the profile, grips about 3x better (or more), lasts in some cases more than 80,000 miles (remember, in 1988 40,000 miles was incredible), and so on.
I can think of other examples from racing that have had direct applicability to production cars and more prosaic issues, like fuel savings: better aerodynamics, better cooling system design, better windage loss control, better oiling and oil control, better porting, multi-stage intake and exhaust maniforlds, tuning for various things (lower noise, more power), shorter flame paths, ceramic coatings, synthetic lubes and fluids, and so on. I am sure that you get the point.
I would like to figure out how to get Linux working on 8 100Mb cards at once. Sooner than we expect we will have 133MHz 64 bit PCI buses, and we should be ready to use them. And figuring out how to do huge things always lets us do the small thinbgs more reliably and usually lets us figure out what the minimum amount of material (steel, rubber, magnesium, C code, cycles) we need to do it is, making it a lost smaller.
but price the licensing for those products. Unless there's maybe 5 users, he's not installing all that. My company did a Linux->NT migration as I walked out the door and Exchange alone ran us a few thousand dollars for 50 users. (sorry, I don't pay attention to prices, I tend to sign off on anything remotely reasonable)
First to all of those who are saying that "You've lost to MS, blah blah blah, give up.", and that we "wouldn't be scrutinizing th results of the tests as much" if we had come out on top. I totally agree people are way more motivated by loss that they are by success. Just look at MS, everyone must admit that they are preforming any miracles. They feel safe where they are, and invoation is a risk. Same thing with car companies, telephone companies, and electric companies.
Now as far as the results the article itself goes, the author admit's that it's advocacy. It does bring up a good point. Being able to crank out a bagillion pages a minute is wonderful, but there are other things to look at such as the application of the machine, the availablity requirements, cost, and available hardware.
The whole affair is an attempt by Micros~1 to get developers to change their focus to something irrelevant. Unfortunately for them there is no one person in charge of development to delegate who works on what. Sure, Linus calls the shots on what makes it into the kernel, but he doesn't tell people what to work on.
This is OT but... of course you are right.
IE5 render my homepage's javascript at least 3 times faster than N4.6. I won't use IE though. However, what you are saying has nothing to do with the discussion. They are talking about dymanically generating the webpage, which should be more important when javascript, xml are standardized.
CY
while you are right, you are STILL talking from the perspective of a technical guy. to several people in managing the numbers simply won't mean a thing. all he cares for is the conclusion, the simpler the better.
so the REAL point would be:
a) yes, NT beat Linux.
b) in a very specific setup
c) with Linux coming in second, but with benchmark values much larger than our company will ever need.
d) as soon as you figure costs into it (not licensing, but TOC), Linux wins.
I'm positive that anything even marginally more complicated and/or technical than this will fall on deaf ears anywhere outside the technical departments.
one more unrelated remark: people CAN do both, code and advocate. my personal contributions are small in both categories, but it makes a lot of sense to me to talk about what you're doing, instead of going with one or the other exclusively.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I hate to say it, but I think we lost this round, M$ wins. /. for examples.
no, I'm not talking about the benchmarking. I'm talking about the non-acceptance of them. remember that M$ is a marketing company, and little else. no matter whether it's right or wrong, non-technical people simply STOP listening to technical details after a while.
that point has been reached. when the Linux community screamed out about the first test, people listened, even in the mainstream. but now, for all THEY care, a new, fair test has been conducted, and any continued discussion on our part will appear as whining - no matter if it's legitimate.
just look at all the anonymous coward postings on
fact is, M$ won this, because they can a) tell everyone how NT is superior to Linux (ignoring the fact, that this has only been proven for one specific setup under specific conditions) and b) point a finger at us for "whining" (ignoring the fact that we may have justified criticism).
maybe they were aiming at this goal all the time, maybe they're just picking up the chance. but one way or the other, from the MARKETING pov (and we all know that that's all M$ cares about), this has been a huge victory for them.
so I suggest everyone stop whining and go back coding. the time for criticism is past, like it or not. anything else you say be better damn constructive (in the sense of "we should fix this and it'll speed things up") or M$ will surely find a way to use it to THEIR advantage.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And understanding this, you are now allowed to use *the* programming language, Fortran. Swap a "D" for the "E", and you specify double precision while you're at it.
It's about time someone chimed in with this pivotal information.
If you ask me it's criminally misleading for ZD to quote "hits per second" and not quote bandwidth too. People have lost all sense of just how gigantic 1000 hits/second is. 20 or so at this size will saturate a T1!
-- Mike Greaves
Any apache site expecting to serve tons of static pages should run squid in accel mode in front of apache. apache's cache (IF USED???) doesn't even come close to squid, and the apache team will readily admit it. .asp.
I can't believe the redhat guys didn't embrace this strategy since it's well known that a key factor in IIS performance is the fact that it caches it's own static pages IN RAM when possible! This is a no-brainer. Note the big increase in performance between 256M and 1G.
Personally, I believe, even given Linux's shortcomings in its TCP stack, we should smoke IIS with a properly configured server.
As for ACTIVE content.. Done properly, mod_perl or php should kill
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Damn! You're right! I remember reading about this in a deadly flame thread on comp.protocols.tcpip. the guy who instigated it did us all a huge favor, as it made everyone think in a state-machine kinda way, which should be elemental to anyone who knows computers.
Sometimes we abstract so much, we forget these things are stupid and have to be slapped into civilty from the metal on up!
Thanks for a great observation!
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
For all the people who want to read the C't article but can't find it: they've placed it online and even translated it! Sure way to get a lot of hits...
The link is:
http://www.ct.heise.de/ct/english/99/13/186-1/
Basically, I think he's right, any reasonable Linux web server can saturate most avaliable bandwidth with _static_ pages.
But, I don't think it's time to settle for that, I think we should go back to look at multithreading and why 4 CPU's gave NT more of a boost, and what that means to what needs to be done in Linux. And, I think that this study also shows that "internet" isn't the problem, so let's look at some faster stuff in the networking world, like SAMBA needs on an "intranet."
Why shouldn't we! MS is going to be beating us over the head with these numbers for years to come.
I still can't find the specs on the tests. Is it a secret?
check this out!
I still want to know why MS was able to use the four partition trick when we could use any new code?
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
Alright. Fine. Linux is not good at striping across multiple NICs (or at least across 4). IMHO that's not a normal thing to do anyhow...
;).
/. or Excite or similar mad dynamic pagegen) that could be forced to work on ASP or PERL under both IIS & Apache? Would be fascinating
;)....
There are really two parts two heavy-duty serving: files and web.
a) Web content
You don't need 4 100Mb NICs to serve real webcontent (no, corporations using "intranets" to be buzzword compliant doesn't count. when i see a serious intranet implementation i may believe it. till then it's just buzzword compliance
No one serves more than cdrom.com, and if they're the only ones straining 100Mb (on 100% static content, at that) 100Mb is good enough fer anyone. Next issue: dynamic content. I want a fair benchmark of IIS and (mod_perl) Apache on PERL and ASP (using mod_asp).
How good is mod_asp ennyhoo? Does IIS do PERL? Does anyone have serious site implementations (on the order of
b) File serving
I'm still not convinced in the real world you need more than a 100Mb card -- if your fileserver can sustain 7 megs/sec (realistic on ethernet, peak is 10 megs/sec) you're doing pretty well with that RAID array, since no HD i've seen can do that alone, especially not when doing simultaneous serves (and therefore not reading contiguous blocks). I'm bothered by the SMB test setup in that sense -- if it was tiny reads out of the cache, big deal. I wanna know who can move real volumes of data, and fast.
Of course, I know the answer. Sun, and after them SGI's Origin2k boxes (the fastest Windows networking fileservers in the world
MS Won this round. No complaints or equivocations. We learned our lession after the first round of tests and started to improve. The absolute best thing we can do is only qualify, and as a last resort ignore, the soon to come MS attacks. This analysis is a good start to qualifying them, but we can't be content. Linux is not invincable, nor will it ever be. Take the this in stride and don't whine. Venting your frustration here is as good as walking into the hallowed halls in Redmond and saying "I'm upset, grind me under your heal please. Take my pride in my OS, it isn't as good as I thought it was!" Domination is just around the corner, but only if you spend your time working towards it rather than saying "It's (still) not fair".
If the ZD numbers are to be believed about NT's performance, and I see no reason to disbelieve them, the NT server that ZD tested should be able to serve 359.9 million hits per day. According to http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_cs_suppor
What's that, I hear someone scream? But Microsoft Support Online involves dynamic content? Well, the ZD test was only about static content. I'm so glad to know that it was relevant to the real world. Aren't you?
Haha, I love it!
- Riko
If you want brainless system installs, look into Ghost by Symantec. It is a dos program that does disk duplication. It is completely configurable from the command line. With a bootable CD containg ghost and the disk image (compressed) an entire machine can be installed in less than 10 minutes. Assuming they have a decently fast CD-ROM of course.
So it's like setting "gunzip | dd" as the init program of a bootable Linux CD, only $40, right?
An assuming you aren't in an NT domain environment where security has any priority. SID changing programs may be sufficient for workstations, but maybe not. There is no way you can Ghost domain controllers, and I personally would worry about any ghosted NT machine. All hail the registry.
P.S. Any misspellings or faults of grammar you think you detect are mearly transmition errors, and probably your fault a
Has anyone performed Linux vs. NT benchmarks with dynamic content? Many have said that it is much closer to real world. Now how about some numbers?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
where can I find it?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
My $0.04 worth...
;-)
1) I use Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOS, Netware, WinX, and occasionally OS/2. Frankly, I care close to nil that NT "came out on top" in the NT vs. Linux test because most of the platforms I use are based on U*ix. Whether a test shows one platform over another to be "faster" has no bearing on my decision to use a certain OS-- I am still using Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOS, Netware, WinX, and occasionally OS/2. Nor am I bitter that under one very particular and controlled environment Linux "lost." The "real world" is not controlled.
2) Linux performance is not at the bottom of the U*ix pack. I believe (for me, that is) that Solaris has been relatively good in terms of performance, yet Linux still manages to best it. I place *BSD at the top. For stability, however, Solaris really takes the cake. But who really cares?! Anything is better than trying to run a Q3TEST server under WinX! =)
So far what I'm hearing is Linux is much faster if either
1) you serve dynamic content
2) you serve from a large set of pages & freqently miss the cache,
and even when serving static pages, your internet pipe is the bottleneck, so Linux won't slow it down.
But what about the file serving results? Seems like Linux would still lag here. You have, say, 100bT, it's not dynamic content, and you can pretty easily generate a huge amount of traffic on just a few files.
Anyone have any insight on this?
oh, please. I *have* installed NT (what a mess), and most of the people in my office use it.
You can tell the NT developers because every month at least one of them is down -- "I'm reinstalling NT". Not "NT locked up", but *reinstalling*, because it futzed up so bad there's nothing to be salvaged.
I used NT as long as I could stand it, which wasn't long. Yeah, it's "stable", if "stable" means you don't use it, you don't change any configuration, and you don't install any software!
Meanwhile I have five linux boxes running & the closest I've ever come to reinstalling is copying files when a disk crashes.
(Yes, but you can't install NT via FTP...)
The average file in ZDNet's WebBench (You can download it, if you wish to) is approximately 10kb big. 10342.3 bytes, to be exact. Use this number when reading the web page.
In other words, a single-processor 256meg box can saturate a T3 with plenty of room to spare (107 MBps). The four-processor Linux box will almost saturate an OC3 (150 Mbps).
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
When M$ comes up with some pointless test set, should we really care about it? Sure, the community can make a point out of showing M$ (and the world) that we can beat M$ any time; M$ comes up with a challenge and we tweak the software until we beat them. But is it worth it?
Linux is lean and mean, because its development is largely driven by technical, not marketing factors. Could this be the beginning of an attempt to drag the Linux community into the same marketing-driven development that leads to the bloated software sold by M$?
Chilli
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
Give me some cash and I will upgrade your hardware for you and you'll have better performance. But no, I cannot increase stability (perhaps a little by picking the right hardware, but there's plenty of stuff in any OS'es kernel that relates to stability and has nothing to do with drivers etc).
As long as Linux is stable, it doesn't matter whether if it is a little slower.
That statement assumes that Apache will never improve. That's certainly not true. Apache will be able to scale with bigger loads, given some patches and a faster, well supported configuration (such as that 1.5 ghz Pentium V processor), etc.
If you throw faster hardware behind Apache, you'll get better preformace than NT on the old machine.
Apache isn't locked into a speed, like DOS's 8.3 char filenames or 640k of RAM in DOS or Apple ProDOS 32meg disks...
IIS vs Apache will make each other stronger and better preforming (honest!)
I really don't see why this article was written.
:) (lets not extend this metaphor)
;)
Why not just accept the results (as long as the Linux community agrees it was fair - and this is acknowledged in the article) and go back to improving the kernel, instead of now saying that the figures arent applicable in real world situations. Noone said anything about this after the first tests, now suddenly the test means nothing because noone likes the final outcome.
Going into a long explanation to water down the importance/application of the tests to somehow save face looks really bad. Whether or no the results can be seen in the wild doesnt matter as NT still proved better.
(Sort of) analogous to defending driving your Citroen 2CV as opposed to a Merc cos you can only drive at 120km/h on the highway
Its generally accepted that the Linux kernel's TCP/IP implementation aint the best there is.
Just Fix It. (Or use FreeBSD *hide*
that page on microsoft was quite interesting. they were saying things like "we are 650% better on this than Linux/Apache" when their graph says N/A for those figures on Linux/Apache.
interesting...
ChiaLea
Something that seems to be completely forgotten about is that the test machine Mindcraft used had, if I remember correctly, 4 NICs in it. What about the possibility that the whole reason for the NT numbers being bigger is that NT simply supports multiple network cards that much better, with Linux support being rather basic (akin to the very basic SMP support in 2.0.x kernels)?
They tried the tests again on a single processor machine with 256mb RAM. Did they try them on a machine with just one NIC to check a possibility like this? Surely nobody can suggest a single processor machine with 256mb and 4 NICs is a configuration that any sensible person would consider.
And if these tests are based purely on static content, then so what? I don't need a quad-Xeon to saturate a 10mb ethernet (which is a waaaay faster link than the vast majority of sites out there have) - my P133 manages it quite happily, with around 80% CPU free.
Hmmm. Was talking to a friend at work (I work with Linux, she works with NT in a different department) and she spoke with horror at finding an NT machine that nobody had restarted in eight months. I actually thought this was a pretty good showing for NT, until she added that after rebooting it didn't come back up again :-)
I believe that was 9x, not NT, although I'm ready to be corrected. Never seen a Windows machine run that long, although we did have a 98 machine at work make it to 35 days (it was doing nothing more involved than putting our label printer on the network...)
Unlimited Bandwidth is physically impossible.
You can talk about BIG, BIGGER or HUGHE but not infinitum or unlimited.
A client had a Netware server crash today (new motherboard, new problems). One particular application that is heavily used in the office lives on that server. When the server crashed, so of course did that app, on everyone's boxes in the office.
Here's the problem: it didn't quite crash, it hung. And NT was unable to kill it. Task Manager tried and failed. The only way to kill it was to reboot each box.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Everyone is rightfully screaming about non-realistic nature of these benchmarks. I am sure my idea is by no means new, but right now I see no big disadvantages why it should not be used as a true benchmark: given that all sight *log* all attempts, why not take these big logs from some highly used sites and then *replay* the log on actual servers. This would simulate what actually has happened in real life for say month or two.
The only trouble I see so far is that the benchmark site should *not* have fully used it's bandswidth during the period, because in this case we won't add up those users who failed to fetch a webpage. Although given simple math we can see that GNU/Linux+Apache can saturate any line with static pages, we could get some real world results using this approach. Comments are welcome.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
If you want brainless system installs, look into Ghost by Symantec. It is a dos program that does disk duplication. It is completely configurable from the command line. With a bootable CD containg ghost and the disk image (compressed) an entire machine can be installed in less than 10 minutes. Assuming they have a decently fast CD-ROM of course.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Heh heh heh. I'll call the NT admin where I used to work and tell him that the HP Netservers that they bought to run NT were ``shitty hardware''. He couldn't even get NT installed without it bluescreening.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
So, the difference between NT and Linux only shows up given unlimited bandwidth. That doesn't suprise me at all. Think about it. MS has the time and manpower to make their server use more bandwidth than they could ever use. Linux developers on the other hand do not much care how well the server performs beyond the capacity of their lines, because they don't care! There is no itch to be scratched in terms of development, because the system works fine for what they ask it to do.
:-P
In fact, it wouldn't suprise me at all if MS worked *very* hard to make benchmark results like this, even though they don't mean anything. Why? Because at MS, appearances are more important than fact. It's all marketing.
Don't worry about Apache not being able to handle extreme (perhaps impossible) amounts of bandwidth. If the day ever comes when it's important, it'll happen! Somebody will find that Apache just doesn't cut it anymore and will fix it! Or maybe they'll fix the kernel if they need to! That's the beauty of Linux and open source.
So, would you rather spend thousands for an operating system that could use more bandwidth that you could ever pay for, or spend *nothing* for an operating system that will handle just about anything that you can throw at it? I know where *I* want to go today and it ain't with MS!
There. Now I feel better.
Ben
He means 2 hours because he is waiting for the whole OS to come down his internet link. In my experiance you can get Redhat installed in under ten minutes from flipping the power switch That is with selecting packages and configuring X. K6-233/64MB/24X cd-rom. Two hours might be a good time to have a completely configured and custumized system.
One day people will learn the folly of Winbloze, Linux Rules!
I just reported what the software told me. Talk to the makers of the software how it is possable.
One day people will learn the folly of Winbloze, Linux Rules!
In my experience Linux has considerably greater performance than NT. Besides, why would I use a Micro$oft product that crashes every day for no reason?
If NT really does perform better, I'll wait until it's stable.
Dom
If your big iron actually talks TCP/IP, I don't think SNA Server is needed (although modern SNA Server versions might do other things, like screen scraping to a web page).
Older IBM stuff didn't (or didn't always) use normal LAN protocols, so SNA Server could be used as a gateway between your LAN and the SNA Network. (Someone else could probably explain this better, and use all the correct IBM model numbers!)
As for PHP+MySQL doing what Exchange does - you're right it *could*. However, most places, when given the choice between buying a calendaring package or writing their own would probably buy one. You're argument is like saying you don't need a RDBMS because you've got GCC.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
thttpd, a small web server for linux (~7000 lines source) should easily outperform the iis on the
mindcraft "benchmark" due to its non forking
behaviour. See the comparison chart on this page.
I don't recall any utilities being available under Linux to assign processor affinity to a PID etc. while utilizing SMP support. Does such a beast exist? If so, great! If not, that may be something nifty to have as a feature...
-- ultra1
Isn't that supposed to be impossible? I thought all windows machines were supposed to die after 47 days.
-matt
I'm not certain I'm reading that right, but it means that microsoft compared NT using dlls to essentially extend the web server itself to produce the output to linux using cgi scripts? Maybe it's just me but it's kinda obvious that NT is gonna win in that test. CGIs require a fork()/exec() which is a lot slower than just pumping out the output. Now NT ISAPI vs. mod_perl or mod_php might have been just a bit more accurate.
-matt
Thanks for posting this. It's awesome to get some real life data to throw into this. I wish that more people would do this. Thank you.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
If someone tries to convince, say, your boss that you should use NT instead of Linux for your website (say you're hosted by a partial T3 and only serve static web pages) and cites these results, will you say:
A) "You're right. These benchmarks prove that NT is superior to Linux and we'd be foolish to go with Linux now, though if we work real hard coding at Linux et al. linux will be able to beat NT at benchmarks so we can switch then."
or
B) "Actually, if you look at the tests rather than the soundbyte about them, you will see that they prove that a Linux/Apache system will be waiting on our internet connection anyhow, and Linux is a much better value protosition than NT is, remote administration to a box with no mouse or monitor is extremely easy, remote displaying comes standard (no need to buy citrix), you get greater stability, and source code that uses open standards so that if life takes one of its many unpredictable turns and Linux is no longer the best solution, we won't be trapped into expensive solutions that we don't want to be in due to vendor lock-in."
So do we give up, or work with what we've got? I suggest that everyone who's whining about "let's stop whining and get back to coding" at least say what you mean, "Let's just give up and try to beat microsoft on their own game instead of doing what we want." The people who do the coding are still doing the coding. This is about advocacy and marketing. I suggest that the people who do Linux Advocacy/marketing don't stop simply because everything didn't go perfectly. These numbers are only a defeat by microsoft if we let them be.
Remember, there is more than one part to the Linux community, just as there is more than one part to the body. Just as I wouldn't suggest that those who do documentation stop doing documentation and start coding, I also wouldn't suggest that those who do marketing stop and start coding.
It takes all sorts to run this world, and we shouldn't start neglecting any part of it, marketing included. Microsoft is going to try to put as much spin on these tests as they can. If we stand by and do nothing, we'll be as guilty as they are of the spinning. Sins of omission are still sins.
I don't suggest that we do it defensively, though. I suggest that we do it confidently and aggressively. act like we're in control. That's the neat thing about self-confidence. If you act like you know what you're talking about, people tend to believe you. So why should we give up acting like we know what we're talking about.
We've got some test results which prove that Linux can handle the needs of 99% of the world. Why exactly should we hush that up in favor of letting it be thought that Linux is slow.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I have been running a linux webserver in various incarnations and machines since 1993. I started on a 486 with some decent scsi (vl-bus) and 8 megs of ram, with a 28.8 hayes modem, matching the isp's.
I generally ran 3.6 kilobytes per second of bandwidth at the time, which wasn't bad for a 100 dollar a month dedicated line.:)
Now adays we use an alpha (for past 2 years) with 128 megs of ram and a T1. One day (and I really mean one 5 minute period) our line was saturated by what seemed to be a webcrawler from taiwan which literally downloaded the entire site. It filled our pipe. That is the only time that such a thing happened and my apache server didn't even blink. I wouldn't have known but I tend to analyze my peak times.
After we decided to upgrade the software on the alpha (redhat 4.2 being a bit old ) I moved the entire site over to a k6-2 running at 300 with 156 megs of ram or something... That hardware cost about 700 all together. (the alpha cost 5000 2 years ago..) It performs fine. I have never seen the apache webserver crash or not respond based on overusage although sometimes dynamic content will slow down (and that is because we don't really optimize for speed). In any case the performance is great for the price. I have bought one copy of redhat 5.0 and have 3 servers all running great. (Finally retired the 486 cause it was hard to find vlbus hardware)...
The basic fact is that the webserver has NEVER been a crisis point or even a decision point. When we went to shttp we went to stronghold as it was the only easy solution at the time. It has never caused us problem.
Further we serve realaudio, handle telnet sessions. handle email, handle pretty much any protocol a client wants. mysql, php, perl, c compilers...
There is literally nothing that we have needed to do that our linux boxes haven't handled. I am so comfortable with them that I have placed linux boxes as controlers for permanent automated exhibits, and have so far only had one hardware crash even.
The notion that NT would be easier for me to maintain, easier for my clients to interact with, or in any way a more efficient use of money is absurd. I don't even know what they charge for NT, but I believe I would rather purchase an extra 256 megs of ram per machine, or a faster processor, then pay to be a beta tester.
I know I am preaching to the converted here, but I started laughing the first time I saw the comparisons. While I WOULD like linux to catch up with SMP and such, and certainly would like to see it scale better, I happen to like being able to buy a 500 dollar computer when I need more processing, and have it up and running in 2 hours (and that because I generally do a redhat ftp instalation)
I betcha you can't do that with a win NT install.
While I do lookforward to an OC-3, I imagine the price of leasing it will be expensive enough that I can afford any number of widdle iddy biddy linux machines to serve up pages. The days of big iron may not be over, but I don't need a mainframe to do something as brain dead as serving static pages.
D
It means low performance when everyone else can saturate even higher bandwidth connections.
Hey... why hope? Mindcraft (as they took such pains to point out) is a neutral party. That means that we can hire them to re-run the test. In fact, perhaps we should announce that we intend to re-hire them, at some specified date (any suggestions?) to perform a re-test... same rules as the second test, which means Microsoft gets to tune NT however they like, but we do too. This challenge is just the kind of thing that the media might pick up on, and the results of such a contest are certain to be picked up by the media.
The only hard part is that we'd actually have to beat them the second time round. And that's only going to happen if all the hype about the advantages of Open Source are true. It is true, isn't it?
If anyone likes this idea, let me know.
-- Michael Chermside, mcherm@destinysoftware.com
Multiple NICs all working at the same time is actually quite necessasary to have working fast and seamlessly. Look at a router / firewall box. Also look at the situation of multiple local networks served by one application / file server. The latter is the one where we need the SMP to work seamlessly for multiple NICs.
Personally I think Linux scales much better than NT. Look at the $$$. One Super NT system with special $100,000 Quad processor System, OS, and IIS software versus 10 $3000 garden variety Linux boxes with 2 Linux boxes to distribute the load between the ten web servers. I've now got three times the load carrying capacity, fault tollerance and one third the price.
Before you say that fault tollerance isn't important: downtime costs big $$$. In a simple office environment. If you have 2000 $25,000 a year people working off of one file server and it goes down for 30 minutes durring a day. Assuming half of them were using the system at the time, you have 1000 people now unproductive for atleast thirty minutes. That's $6,250 in simple lost productivity for wages alown for that one incident. Add in lost updates to files that hadn't been saved before the server crashed, Office overhead costs, etc. You will quickly find that the real costs are over twice as much. It's unfortunatly very hard to quantify them so usually they don't get looked at, and if they do, the numbers are very unprecise. Unfortunatly the losses are still there even if they aren't totalled up. The interesting thing is the numbers above are for one incident only. If the system goes down once a month, that's a minimum of $75,000, and easily as high as $150,000 a year.
In a $100,000 a day E-Commerce site, if you lose the system for thirty minutes, that's $2,083 assuming an evenly distributed load over the day. Unfortunatly systems go down at peak times, so you'll be looking at a much higher loss of $$$. Easily as high as 5 times as much. To lose 10% of your business in one day hurts. Sure some of the people will come back at a latter time, but some will go elsewhere. You may even lose customers forever if it happens to often, or they may endup finding a better supplier.
While the article is rather interesting in and of itself, I think it points to a bigger issue: in computer industry in general, and in benchmarkig in particular, proper scientific tools and methods are often not used.
Statistics is your friend! If some psychologists used similar methodology for their investigation, they would be laughed at -- I won't even talk about hard sciences.
Yet in benchmarking, the perpetrators completely ignore representativeness of their samples -- this is all benchmarks are really supposed to be, controlled investigation of the performance of a representative sample of real-world computing activities. How can you investigate performance if you don't even try to account for various miscellaneous factors by using proper sample selection?..
What can I say?.. The entire thing disgusts me. I would rant more, but I will simply go and sob in the corner about lack of scientific methodology in my field of choice.
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Victor Danilchenko
Yeah, the speed of IIS on NT and Apache on Linux doesn't actually matter in reality because the size of the pipe used will limit the speed to a much smaller number anyways, unless you have a ridiculously large pipe (multiple OC3s, anyone?). This difference will only matter if someone sets up a box with a ridiculously large pipe, which most sites don't have. Most sites which host large numbers of other sites don't have that kind of bandwidth. This all really cuts down the significance of the Mindcraft studies, even if they were perfectly legitimate. So what that Apache on Linux was slower than IIS on NT, because that doesn't matter in reality!
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I remember hearing about how linux follows the TCP spec and uses slow start, but NT doesn't.
When a TCP connection is first established, and one machine wants to start sending data to the other, it isn't supposed to start sending as fast as it can. Rather, it's supposed to send only one packet, then wait for an ack, then send two packets, etc. Otherwise you end up with congestion rendering the network useless as you approach full bandwith. Van Jacobson (remember VJ header compression from the days of SLIP?) has a paper on this.
Since the mindcraft test has unlimited bandwidth, no packetloss, no slow modem connections, etc. TCP stacks that don't do slow start properly can send out more data than ones that do.
To me this highlights the one true evil force in the world. No, not Microsoft. Ignorance. Dr. Science once said "Ignorance is bliss, and tonight, we're a happy country." I could not agree more.
The basic problem is not Microsoft. Not their products, not their technology (or lack thereof), not their marketing people. The problem is the number of people who do not think critically. The NT benchmark does not lie. It simply tells a very narrow slice of truth and "positions" that truth to show NT and IIS in the best possible light.
To me, the one outrageous thing in Microsoft's benchmark page is the chart that shows total cost of ownership. Now, I'm not a CIO, CEO, or CFO, but it seems the me that cost per transaction per unit time is completely irrelevant. What matters (as the author of the article we are commenting on here points out) is cost per transaction and can you handle your transaction volume?
When decision makers look no deeper than the cooked figures from NT's benchmark, when they fail to see if the scenario represents their business and technical reality, then their business gets what they deserve.
What the "Microsoft Advertising for Linux" article does that is lauditory is it cuts through to a core question. Which is cheaper given a certain use case? It wisely does not answer, but merely points out that in most cases, even in most intranets the Mindcraft/Microsoft scenario is extremely unlikely and that Linux/Apache on even limited hardware will handle most loads anyone would reasonable expect.
It also wisely points out that if you are a site in the tiny fraction that will exceed Linux/Apache's capacity, then by all means use NT/IIS.
Then, one more dig of my own at the TCO figures. Even if we grant the validity of the figure cost per transaction unit time (which I do not), what happens if you set up ten servers, or twenty? Linux costs nothing more for ten servers than it does for one. I haven't the time to see how many servers it would take, but there would come a break even point and then a point where Linux/Apache is cheaper even using the dubious measure in the Microsoft study.
Finally, I just want to congratulate the author of "Microsoft Advertising for Linux?" for showing the value of just trying some of your own math and asking, "Hey, is this reasonable?" If we all did this routinely regarding everything from computer bechmarks to medical scare news stories we would live in a much saner and less stressful world. Whichever operating system you buy.
I notice in the article from Pc mag article,
they mentioned linux originally trounced NT, and then they went away and worked until they could
beat linux. So, linux coders fix the problem, and all is well.
For a specific problem, if you through enough money at it, you can usually come up with a hack that will make you come out on top. Simply shows that we were a bit complacent perhaps..
Of course, MS ignored the fact that this version of NT only exists in their labs. The version out there that everyone is using is still getting its but kicked by the linux boxes out there!
I also think that it would be interesting if they had mixed the tests. Perhaps had the server do file and web serving and perhaps printing at the same time. Linux can handle all of this and still fly..
It's been my experience NT gets a lot slower..
Ryan
"I am assuming that the tests that ZD made were meant to mean something, so I won't entertain the idea that they used an average file size of less that 1K. Given that, It is clear that the numbers that ZD's tests produced are only significant when you have the equivalent bandwidth of over 6 T1 lines. Let's be clear about this: . . . if your site runs on 5 T1 lines or less, a single CPU Linux box with 256 MB RAM will more than fulfill your needs with CPU cycles left over."
What percentage of the Linux using world would these tests pertain to then? If I was the person making the decision on which OS to use for a corporate website (with T3 connectivity), I would take into consideration a little bit more than one benchmark's POV.
Ever wonder why your car insurance company makes you get three estimates for the $600.00 dent that bambi left on your hood?
"We have, on the other hand, never heard of an NT support contract supplying NT kernels specially designed for customer problems."
-Article in C't computer magazine. (link is around here somewhere.....).
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
The German c't Magazine has also conducted a comparative benchmark between NT 4.0 SP3 with MS IIS 4.0 and Linux (SuSE 6.1) with Apache 1.3.6, both running on a Siemens Primergy 870 Web Server (4x Pentium II Xeon @ 450 MHz, 2 GB RAM with a 4 disc-RAID-5 system).
(Mindcraft used a RAID-0 system, which might be even faster, but doesn't in any way guard your data if bad luck strikes - incidentially, one HD died during the test... :)
Anyhow, the test showed again that NT is faster when it comes to serving static pages, especially when using SMP... but then again, the test also showed that Linux smokes NT when it comes to CGI - but they also warned that NT users might use ASP instead of CGI, which is hard to compare... still, it's funny that CGI under NT was rather weak - or is that a way of MS guiding people to use ASP?
Another thing the test showed was that NT was only leading when it could serve all static pages directly from memory; it fell behind Linux when it had to read the files from disk due to insufficient disk cache...
I'd tell everyone to go look at the results themselves, but I can't seem to find this story on their web server... they mention it being in the newest issue, but sadly they didn't put it online... *GRRR* : /
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
HMMM, Rob, I have an idea, remember when we tested the new /. server, and banged the heck out of it. Why don't we do that one day for an NT server, and the next day for a linux one. We can do it at the same time and everything, then just don't tell anyone which was on one day and which was the other. I think this would tell us everything we need to know. Then again, I don't know if we could put slashdot on NT, but I think we could work out something that uses dynamic content, and would be a real world test.
...Here at >named chnaged to protect the guilty.. let's say a large computer company we get approximately 40% of our hits per day over a 4 hour period. Between 10 and 12 and 2 and 4. Sure if you are getting a steady stream over 24 hours you aren't going to have many problems with either solution, but that definitely isn't the case.
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My God, linux users are really pulling out the stops to mincr, re-mince, and doubly re-mince the results of these performance tests. I don't think they'd be so critical of the numbers and methodology had linux come out on top.
Actually, most linux users that I know are quite level headed and take benchmarks for what they are worth. Of course, any community has its freaks. I do not consider the author of this one to be one of them -- he was illustrating a valid point.
BTW, you seem to be pulling out all of the stops to stereotype linux users as raving lunatics who cannot stand to live if their favorite OS looses in a benchmark.
And now this report that basically says that low performance is okay because your employees shouldn't be using an intranet that much anyway.
Something tells me that if your employees are generating ~1500 hits per second on an internal web server, you have bigger problems than a slow operating system.
Come on people, you lost fair and square.
I won't dispute that, but a lot of people do not seem to understand that this was not a test of NT vs. Linux. What you can say is that IIS on NT beat Apache & Zues on Linux, when serving static web pages.
Linux performance has always been at the bottom of the unix pack. Why do these tests shock you?
Have you ever run Linux vs. Solaris on uniprocessor Sun hardware?
Did you stop reading after the first few paragraphs? He explicitly mentioned that the distribution of hits would not be uniform. I quote:
"So Linux/Apache should be able to handle your site on a 4 CPU 1 Gig RAM box if you get 159 million hits per day or less. If you get only a measly 113 million hits/day, then a single CPU box with 256 meg of RAM should be able to host your site. Of course, this only works if your access is 100% even which is extremely unrealistic. Let's assume that your busy times get ten times more hits per second than your average hits/second. That means that a single CPU Linux box with 256 meg of RAM should work for you if you get about 11 million hits every day. Heck, let's be more conservative. Let's say that your busy times get 100 times more hits/second than your average hits/second. That means that if you get 1.1 million hits per day or less, that same box will serve your site just fine."
hrm, $300 for an OS, or $300 for ram....
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The M$ support site referred to speaks of "129,000 vistors per day" and "2.3 Million Page hits".
A quick glance at the HTML coming out of the site shows that the 17 or so hits-per-visitor that this implies is quite consistent with 2-3 true pages.
So, I bet that the 2.3 million is the actual number of http requests responded to.
The problem with picking apart the benchmark results, and particularly with the line of argument that says "with all the bandwidth we have today, you don't need to go any faster," is that it sounds too much like "you'll never need more than 640K of RAM" or "32M is big enough for a partition." Sure, today a Linux server may be fine for almost all needs, but let's not use that as an excuse to let the status quo stay unchanged.
This is similar to our experiences trying to install SCO Unixware/SCO Openserver 5 on an HP Netserver (linux wouldn't install at all - driver support is lacking).
We installed Openserver trying to work around the driver problems with NT (not NT's fault - just don't buy HP Netserver!)
Point #1 actually brings up something I've had on my mind for a while.
What about a code/distribution/architecture fork to attack the desktop market? Would it be desirable to fork the system to be optimized and designed for workstation use, and continue the current design/architecture/code tree for server use?
It seems to me that trying to attack the desktop market with a system that is server centric is a non-technically-optimal idea. Kind of like putting a GUI on NetWare. One size may fit all, but it doesn't end up fitting anyone very well.
The goals of a workstation and server as I see them are radically different. On the server side, how practical/important/useful are things like 3D Video and audio cards? On the desktop, these sorts of things are much more important.
Similiarly on a server I would think task scheduling and prioritization would be handled more evenly than on a workstation. How about a system that can easily "get out of the way" of a game or other app that needs dedicated resources?
Any thoughts?
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The math shows that linux boxes with one CPU can do 1000 hits per second reliably with room to grow. Now tell the truth, your administration staff is on call and they have to reboot your NT boxes 2-3 times a week for unexplained reasons, don't they? NT admins think rebooting a box 3 times a week is just a part of standard maintenance, to "put out fires". Unix admins use what's called sleep instead of "Midnight Maintenance". Apache wasn't designed with brute force in mind, the development team admits that. They used real world situations to model what was realistically going to happen and make a secure and DEPENDABLE system. Not a toy to show off with...
I work in a shop with a unix (hp9000) backend and an NT frontend, a bunch of web MLS services, they also have a bunch of file and print services, blah blah etc. I'm on a 24 hour pager and I've worked here for over 6 months with over 40 production (average of 150 users a piece) UNIX boxes and NEVER been paged. The NT guys are in here AT LEAST twice a week in the middle of the night rebooting boxes because they mysteriously are broken. Now, they may be uninformed admins with "memory timing problems" whatever you want to call them, but I mean that's just what I've seen from my own personal experience. I'm glad your machines work well, but I'm not misinformed... just stating what I've seen and heard from all my NT admin friends, not just the ones that work here either. They all assume that's how computers are supposed to behave, I'm just stating my opinion to the contrary.
For example, thier file server crashed because a print driver was wrong. What's up with that?! A OS should never crash because of a wrong driver, maybe throw a message at the console but not cease to operate. The funny thing was it was actually still printing, it was just testy and mucked up! If you want to call that acceptable I don't know who is really the weenie... As for memory timing, I can only assume that you mean bios settings, and I have had problems with that many times, because my settings were wrong in the BIOS NT workstation would keep crashing. Since linux doesn't use the BIOS I've never had that problem at all... o, well I guess I just stooped to your level, but it was fun. Adieu
NT beat Linux (on these benchmarks, at least), even when Linux was optimally configured. We whined for a retest with an optimally configured Linux, and got it - hey, we even got a lot of changes in the test setup - UP as well as SMP, different RAID controller, NT as well as Win 95 clients... BUT, we STILL lost.
Rather than whining, I'd say there's a lot to be grateful for - mainly the fact that the testing has shown some prior bottleneck assumptions to be wrong, and has exposed the real problems which can now be addressed. Given the results, the press coverage has also been rather kind to Linux.
yes, you are right. but then the difference in response time would not matter much: if the difference between 1000req/s and 2000req/s was caused by a longer response latency then that would make a difference of 0.0005sec (0.5ms). most users will not notice :-) most browsers will take longer to render the page.. as soon as bandwith becomes a limiting factor the time to transfer the page will be most of the response time the users sees...
mond.
serving one static html page 4k size: NT and linux almost on par (linux ahead a few %) both systems answer 900 requests/s when hit with 512 concurent client process.
with 8k size static page: linux is between about 5 and 10% ahead of NT.. at 512 client processes the linux maschine serves about 600 requests/s the NT maschine about 550.
using a 4K page but selecting one random page out of 10E4 pages linux has about 830 req/sec and NT about 720. the linux line seems saturated where the NT line is bended down already: linux 15% ahead of NT
random 4K static page out of 10E6 different pages: linux about 270 req/s while NT has never more then about 30 req/s. that means linux is some 800% ahead..
now some dynamic pages. they used plain old CGI scripts with perl. no PHP or ASP. using all 4 CPUs linux answers 210 till 250 request/s while NT is around 60! that means linux is 316% faster
same as above but using only 1 of the CPUs of the maschine: linux around 100 req/sec, NT around 25 req/sec. linux ahead by 300%
if the script contains a sleep(3) at the beginning (to simulate slow database connection or slow client connections) the results are: linux increases the number of requests linear with the number of requesting processes and reaches about 80 req/s for 250 simulated clients. NT is saturated at around 7 req/sec. (in words: seven). linux wins with over 1000%
the only time that NT is ahead of linux (about a factor of 2) is when using 2 NIC cards instead of 1.
my interpretation of all this: i guess there are very few webservers where one would needs more then 100Mbit/s.. and then one would be propably better of with 2 cheaper systems doing load balancing.. given the extra reliabilty, remote managemnt, etc of linux and the better extraordinary better performance in most tests linux is the clear winner. doing fast CGI scripts is by far more importnat then to efficiently support 2 or more 100Mbit cards.. at least for 99.9% of all webservers or more..
greetings from vienna, austria.
der mond.
The german computer magazine ct published in their last issue (number 13) a test NT/IIS vs. Linux/Apache as a webserver. They uses a 4 processor Siemens box with a raid 5 as disk storage.
Here is what they found out: (All numbers are estimates from the charts. They may be off, but not much)
First, as soon as you have to use more than one network-adapter NT wipes Linux butt on static pages. Linux seem to be pretty bad in this area. Their guess is, it has something to do with the kernel and multthreading. This verifies pretty much the findings of Mindcraft.
The main part however was dedicated to a slightly different scenario. They tested a few different things.
The first test was serving a single static file of 4 kB size. They stopped measuring at 512 serving processes which corresponds on their environment to about 950 hits/s for bot linux and NT, Linux leading. With 8 processes NT leads 560 to 480 hits/s, from 16 to 32 processes they are roughly the same, from 64 processes on Linux leads by 20 to 50 hits/s.
The second test was the same as the first only with 8 kB size. There Linux leads the whole way by 20 to 50 hits/s maxing out at about 550 to 530 hits/s.
The third an the forth thest were again serving 4 kB files. In the third test the number of files (10000) all fitted into the cache, in the forth thest they didn't. In test number 3 NT is only a bit better with 8 processes (380 to 320 hits/s) ans then linux leads by about 100 hits/s maxing out at 820 hits/s to 720 for NT.
As soon as NT needed to use the disk (1000000) its performance wasn't so good. It stayed at a constant 20 hits/s while Linux went from 50 hits/s to 280 for 512 apache processes. It seems NT doesn't like a raid 5 that much. It prefers a raid 0.
The fun really started when the tried dynamic pages with Perl scrips. There the single processor apache was able to serve about twice as much pages than the 4 CPU IIS server. the numbers:
NT 1 CPU: 30 hits/s
NT 4 CPU: 55 hits/s
Linux 1 CPU: 105 hits/s
Linux 4 CPU 200 to 245 hits/s
Then they added, to simulte database queries a delay of 3 s into the cgi script. The the performance for the NT server dropped from 30 to less than 5 hits/s. For Linux, the performance was linear to the number of processes, starting a 5 hits/s for 1 process going to 80 hits/s for 256 processes instead of the 105 for the version without the delay.
Their conclusion [rough translation]:
For a dedicated webserver with static HTML only, additional CPU are not worth the bother. Even on 2 Fast Ethernet Segments, the increas is only about 20%. CPU power seems not to be the limiting factor. [...]
The realitively bad results for Linux with two network adapter indicate, that the Mindcraft result are plausible and NT and IIS are better performing then their free competition, if one want to play by MIncrafts rules.
[Then some text explaining that 1000 hits/s is about then times the peak value they get on their server and those pages have to be static and cached.]
As our test demonstrate, the Mindcraft results can not be applied to situations, where pages have to be generated dynamically, which is the case on nearly all serious web-sites.
In SMP-mode Linux showed some definite weakenesses. Even kernel developer acknowledge , that Linus still has problems with scalability in SMP settings, specially if the load occurs in kernel modules. However, if the load is as with CGI-scrips, in user modules, Linux profits fully from the additional CPU. There is work done to fix these problems.
For real applications as web-servers, Apache and Linux are already ahead. If the pages cannot be served directly from the cache, the situation is even better for Linux: Here the commercial products from Redmont are not even getting close the open souce projects.
[They finish on telling that Mindcraft was right about the fact, that finding tuning info on Linux and Apache can be hard and do not rival a commercial support infrastructure. But once they got to the developer, they got help fast, whereas it Microsft a week to reply. They also mention that you wont get a kernel personalised for your environment from Microsoft.]
[End of rough translation.]
On the whole the article is a bit too pro-linux. They should at least try to compare similar web-application done as CGI and ASP. This would give some relevant information on how the servers compare for similar tasks. I personally don't care whether I have to write a perl-script or ASPs.
Servus,
johi
PS: Not the article was not available on the web the last time I checked.
The last bug I remember in apache was the flooding it with lots of headers, which was fixed right away. I dont remember a buffer overflow ever being in apache, there might have been one but that woul d have been a long time ago. Now IIS4.0 has a buffer overflow that www.eEye.com found, which gives remote users system access. So assuming you had a Mindcraft survey type machine (4 cpus, huge bandwidth, lots of RAM), now some script kiddie can use that to crack passwd files, or since NT does threading so well, make a threaded port scanner and scan entire Class A's for the newest exploits. Its hard to beleive with how big M$ is they still have a new buffer overflow in one of their programs every 2 weeks. I mean, how hard is it to use snprintf instead of sprintf. M$ could even afford to hire someone full time just to grep for sprintf in any program that uses the internet.
Personally, Id rather just be able to serve 100million hits a day or whatever it was and not have people getting root on my server constantly.
We ran the servers for a festival in the Netherlands at the end of may (pinkpop), which was quite popular (5 million hits on the peak day) To make sure we stayed up we built a Linux box with a P2-300 and 128 MB memory with a 10Mbit connection to the net (our provider has 100Mbit) At peak times we would be serving 150hits/sec This includes dynamic pages, we solved this by setting apache up in frontproxy mode, and letting it server the static pages from disc and the dynamic one's through the proxy mode. We used mod_rewrite's fileexists to check if we had the file otherwhise it would proxy. Any static pages that where retrieved through proxy from the 'main' server would get pushed back to the front.
We are still refining this setup as the order in which new pages/images get pushed to the front is quite significant to not overload the backend server (which is the one generating the dynamic html),it did catch about 900K hits that day though, and it is a Java webserver (written ourselves)
The conclusion is that the problem is more in how to 'staticify' dynamic pages then serving static pages as a simple P2-300 had no trouble with it (load not above 10, CPU not above 30%) even with the 'file exist/proxy' rules from mod_rewrite.
Please remember that this is a test of a specific condition of web traffic under static (not dynamic) conditions. I can say with certainty that if the tests had been conducted with actual web traffic, then Linux would have won. Traffic loads and speed aside, Windows NT IIS simply cannot maintain long amounts of uptime without a server swap or reboot. This benchmark only serves as a guide for the required improvements needed in Linux. Linux is still the OS that has uptime records counted in years not days and hours.
As a switchgear technician, I can say that using Linux is like retrofitting existing, reliable equipment.
Just because it is old, does not mean that it is useless. NT may be better under extremely specific conditions, but it is like buying an expensive under-voltage, over ladened circuit breaker. Anyone care to guess what happens when a low voltage breaker is used in high voltage switchgear? You will fuse the contacts (like a Blue Screen of Death halt). When we retrofit older equipment, we reuse relaible technology and add relable, newer components to improve performance. This is how Linux is to me. The benchmark tests only tell me that it is better to drive a Volvo that an MGB.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Wouldn't it be appropriate for MS supporters to "mince" the results of a benchmark I concocted specifically to show NT in its worst light and Linux in its best? Would you quietly accept that Linux was "faster"? ....ah, I thought not!
And, in defense of some of the mincing, let me add this: Between my two sites I have maybe 25 static pages and over 64,000 dynamic pages. Static page tests on a single, very expensive, box are not very "real world". If I need more static serving capacity, I'm not restricted to one server (when multiple, smaller servers are cheaper). And, if I really require a single, centralized server, its because I'm serving dynamic content. Where does the massive, expensive, single machine, static web server logically fit in this scenario?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Seriously, are you saying that, if I have a 1440 DSL line that can crank out T1 speeds, that my two Linux servers (dual-CPU Pentium boxes, one is 350MHz chips with 128MB RAM and dual 9GB HD, the other is 400MHz chips with 128MB RAM and dual 9GB HD) can't possibly be stressed out due to bandwidth maximums?
...
Cool!
Will in Seattle
who doesn't need NT/IIS I guess
Will in Seattle
I think this shows the right perspective. Common sense doesn't seem to be involved in the "tests".
Just raw numbers. Hmmmm... What's the negative point score for having to reboot the server all the dang time?
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
This is something I've been saying for a while, but recently have begun to reconsider my position. Emperical observations seem to imply that, on the client's side, processing can be a limiting condition in real-world scenarios.
Right now, I'm using Opera across a fractional T1. I also have used, on this computer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla M7, and MSIE4. At home, on a shared 33.6k (I live too far out in the country to get a good 56k), I use Lynx and KFM, and have used Navigator and Mozilla on that machine. My roommate is evaluating IE5 vs Opera.
That's a lot of browsers, and a lot of rendering algorithms. Based on emperical evidence under uncontrolled conditions (read: totally unscientific numbers), it appears that the choice of app can make a significant difference. This would seem to imply that the browser's algorithm-- hence the CPU speed-- can make an observable difference.
Thoughts?
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Fourth law of programming: Anything that can go wrong wi
It is interesting to see someone actually present some useful information regarding "Benchmarks". Note that the article does not refute the benchmark; it just puts it into a different perspective. It also puts into perspective the difference between a benchmark and reality. If you really think about it, how many sites can possibly get the volume of hits required to run into these numbers? I mean, how many sites are being served over a dedicated T3? Most are coming over load balanced T1s or what have you that are shared amoung numerous other physical boxes. (That is not to say that there are not some sites having such a load.) Even if you had such a site, you probably wouldn't want to rely on a single server to handle the whole thing anyway. (Single point of failure? That's asking for trouble.)
Well, that's my 14 cents worth.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
This rant points out the fact that Microsoft's "Support Online" site uses six servers and contrasts that with the fact that, according to the ZD benchmarks, they should only need one webserver.
First of all, there's nothing to say that the boxes MS uses for "Support Online" are the have the same CPU, amount of memory, et al. used in the benchmarking.
Secondly, who's silly enough to put up a production website with only one webserver? Redundancy == good.
Lastly, the link that's given says that the site is made up of six SERVERS, *not* WEBSERVERS. Don't ya think one or more of those is a database server? Maybe?
I think that this analysis proves a good point, that bandwidth is the limiting factor. I talk with home users all the time that want internet access and a p3-550 system. Time and time again I tell them that even with a cable modem their computer is tens if not hundreds of times faster than the data coming in, and to save the extra money.
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A bunch of weekend warriors, part-timers, idealists, hacks, academics and a few professionals have a multi-billion dollar corporation on the run. The noises coming from Redmond are getting more and more desperate, I really think they are worried.
There are 3 major areas that Linux needs to compete on:
1) Ease of use. We want Joe User with few skills to be able use it effectively.
2) Perfomance. Enough said about that.
3) Marketing. We need to let people know that OpenSource and Linux and other great alternatives to commercial vendors exist and how they will benefit from it.
Until we can fix deficienies in all three of these areas, MS and its propaganda machine can win.
I hope they redo the test next year and see how much of an improvement team Linux can achieve....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
MS wins -
Think like a suit...
CIO addresses server software question..
Press reports NT faster...
Linux says UNFAIR ! Biased test ! Rematch !
re-test by 'objective third party'
NT still faster
faster = better
NT best I knew that open software idea was krap... they got two trys and still...
end of attention to minor tech debate...
hows my portfolio today..
morturii
I'd wager to say that despite all of the dynamic content on heavy load sites (e.g. Yahoo, CNN), static content is still a major issue and bandwidth drain. Specifically, images are a real big performance drag.
While your server farm might be able to handle the bandwidth, the pipe inbetween you and the eventual downloader may not be so fat. For example, no matter what a site in the UK is running, it's going to seem slow here in the US. This is why many major web sites have contracted with Akamai to move static data (e.g. images) to sites around the world closer to users. Next time you visit Yahoo, you'll probably download images from an Akamai server closer to home, and it'll be really fast.
Point being, most big sites send out more data in static images than in dynamic HTML (Slashdot comment forums excluded).
I work for a university in Wisconsin. Currently I am working on building a new web server. We, like most of the world, don't need a very beefy server. My test server was a P133 w/64 megs of ram, a 10baseT network card on a 10baseT network. I used the same ZDBop tests that they did and Linux/Apache killed IIS 4.0. When IIS 4.0 got to @20 clients on my test bed, it choked out and leveled off. Meanwile Apache kept accelerating up to and beyond 80 clients. I've tested it with as many as 100 cleints (which is more than my server will ever see) and can't get the performance to level off on Apache. In other words, I personally don't see the need for a 512MB quad processor web server for the most of us. Because on my wimpy machine, on my isolated 10baseT network, I couldn't beat Apache/Linux no matter how hard I tried.
I run a medium sized web site on a p90 with
pathetically slow hard drives and too little
memory. Linux and apache of course... I'd like
to see NT even run anything usefull on a p90!
But that damn p90 sure can peg the T1 it's on
with relative ease.
but I digress, a loss is still a loss, and saying
that linux still easily outruns 99.999% of
anyone's bandwdith is just an attempt to sanitize
the loss, ie. "linux is more than fast enough"
Well that's the same as windoze, "windoze is
good enough" for most people. [sic].
nutsaq
I think your dead on this one. There was days when we was running NT we would have to reboot the damn box every day or we didn't serve web pages. Weird huh? Maybe a bug in NT? Or a F????? grin you fill in the blank.
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