NT Beats Linux in Round 2

strat writes "PC Week ran it's own benchmarks, with Mindcraft, Microsoft and Red Hat. The margins were tighter this time, but NT still fared better. They specifically mentioned the lack of multithreading in the Linux IP stack as the main bottleneck. I wonder how 4.4lite would have fared? "

Comments

The FUD lords have slahsdot! More posts==more FUD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Post it again!

WOW! LOOK AT THAT!

Linux failed a third (and forth, and fifth) time! Oh my God! We need to ditch this loser OS worldwide before it destroys us all! And embrace our deliverer and saviour Bill Fucking Gates.

MEEPT!!!!

Where's the stability tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure I can run my Toyota's engine at 9000 RPM and beat out Corvetts in short term races. Of course my car will fly apart and die under such operating conditions before long.

I have old Linux 1.2 boxes running as ftp/http servers and others exporting nfs filesystems that have be up for over a year. They just keep chugging along without crashing. NT has never even come close to this level of stability and reliability.

Linux is like my Toyota, it may not be the fastest, but it runs and runs and runs and has outlasted many a faster car. Oh yeah, it also does its job on 386s and 486s. NT won't even install on this hardware even though this hardware is more than fast enough for this type of network usage.

Re:Where's the stability tests?

[gavinhall]

Posted by Synsthe:

If Linux is to succeed,

If Linux is to succeed? I think you're confusing succeed with "beat MS". Linux has already succeeded, it's a very stable solution, a very powerful solution, and does it's job very well for many, many tasks.

Linux just needs to continue improving, and adding new support for newer greater things (as long as it doesn't sacrifice any of it's stability or power to do so), and that's what it is doing.

Linux has succeeded as far as Linus' original goals for it already.

Now it's just going to keep getting better.

--
Mark Waterous (mark@projectlinux.org)

Re:Where's the stability tests?

[infinii]

You don't get it do you?

If Linux is to succeed, it must do so in the corporate environment. Last time I checked, large corporations had the money and didn't need to run crucial services on retired old 486s.

Stop bitching and whining. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, we just have to go back to coding and beat them in the next round. Then the world will see how efficient the open source model of development is.

Rob Malda wants to increase Slashdot hits

[Anonymous Coward]

Rob needs to generate hits for his advertising buddies, so he reposts these inflammatory articles every couple of days. It's flame bait, pure and simple. Ignore it.

Re:Rob Malda wants to increase Slashdot hits

[TurboJustin]

As a linux user and advocate I'm insulted by this. The term FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) can describe 90-someodd percent of anti-Linux writings. Most is written by people who fall into a couple of groups:

(1) Don't know about linux or care to know

(2) Benefit from MS products and don't care to see linux succeed

(3) noone listens to them anymore so they join in and bash linux, this increases readership, they get tons of e-mail, albeit mostly flames, and feel loved once again

There are writings that show linux in a light that I don't necessary agree with, but that aren't exactly what you'd call FUD, and there are amateur postings and writings pro-linux that are pure FUD, or maybe it's opposite (comfort, certainty, and sureness?). Some linux advocates take it much too far. They flame writers who they disagree with, they don't beleive anything that shows linux in a negative light, and they follow blindly. These are, by large, the sheep who have moved from the microsoft flock to the linux flock. They will always be in a flock somewhere, but will not really be accepted by those outside of the flock with similar beleifs, i.e. the smart linux users, the *real* windows professionals, etc.. they decree that anything linux is good and anything else is bad. That's bullshit. I'm not afraid to say that I get paid to advocate linux, more specifically the version of linux my company makes, but everything I tell people is true. I don't answer questions I don't know the answer to, I don't make up stories so people will agree that our product is better. If people do not beleive, I try to show them. I think linux is a wonderful product, I enjoy using it, developing with and for it, and playing around with it when I'm bored. there is *always* something new and exciting going on in the linux world. That's awesome.

There becomes a point on the path of a windows professional where you are no longer solving challenging problems, but trying to correct for bad software design. A couple of percent, even 40% difference in performance is not big when you stress the TCO which is a term that Microsoft almost seems to have coined. A 100-pc network with 3 NT servers would cost more for software than hardware. Double the server hardware and use linux and viola, you've corrected for the small performance difference. Add a contribution to the kernel code to help tighten up the IP stack and you're on the way to greatness :)

Anyway, I guess I went a bit long but I'm tired of Linux users and advocates being portrayed as a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth, semi-retarded, religious( in the software sense) idiots. Many of us are intelligent, reasonable, and pretty damned nice. We just don't tend to shout as loud. I don't see linus as my lord and savior, though he seems to be a pretty cool guy.

let's all just be friends..

C't did their own benchmarks.

[Gleef]

The German computer mag C't decided to do their own, more detailed benchmarks. Their conclusion was that the PC Labs/Mindcraft results sound plausible, but under more realistic scenarios, Linux & NT are neck and neck, or Linux beats NT soundly. Find the English version of the article here

Re:C't did their own benchmarks.

[PrinceOfChaos]

They were not completely objective when testing CGI. ASP would be a better choice and ASP scripts could be created to match functionality of CGI scripts.

To BSD or not to BSD, that is the question

[Bill Henning]

BSD might have performed better for this test; however now that the problem is known I am sure there is going to be a patch released shortly that will fix the problematic locking. I think these tests were very useful; they pointed out several places where Linux could be improved / tuned.

Re:To BSD or not to BSD, that is the question

[Aki Laukkanen]

Maybe this is a lesser know fact because it didn't
appear in the PC Week stories but the FreeBSD people
were there too.

Mike Smith's ZD labs test update

Webbench results including FreeBSD and Solaris 7

The bottom line is of course that given this configuration and test setup neither of the free operating systems have much to boast about.

Re:To BSD or not to BSD, that is the question

[Leapfrog]

FreeBSD has excellent SMP support. In fact, that's something they pride themselves on.

Re:Responsiveness

[Falrick]

You forget. According to the ZDnet article, Microsoft has addressed this issue. They researched why their serving files via Microsoft Networking was slow, and saw that a little tweaking could take care of it more easily than a code rewrite. With a comercial package, there are times that it is simply easier from everyone's perspective if you just tell people how to fix it then try to deal with a new situation through a maintenence release. Perhaps this will be something included in a service pack of NT.

Shaking your finger at them and saying "Baha! You're faster than we are, but who cares because we continue to make changes that get us closer to where you were with all of your problems!" gets us no where. Be constructive. Think of Microsoft as the best teacher we could have. See what problems they have with their OS, and then look at Linux and see if maybe it doesn't have some of the same problems. If yes, then fix them. They've been around longer and so are bound to have experienced more problems.

Not FUD, Fuel

[gavinhall]

Posted by hurstdawg:

I think before we get a bunch of ./'ers yelling about how this is more Micro$oft FUD we should step back and realize how good this will be for linux. Ever heard the saying, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger?" I think that applies great here. Micro$oft is now convinced that they are #1, and Linux will never be able to compete. But, if we take this as a learning experience (I know, I know, you thought you were done with that in college... :) We can improve on our weakness', turn around with the upgrades (much faster than Redmond could) and blow them out of the water down the road, w/out them even expecting it. So I think its important we don't just think of this as more FUD, but as a chance to find out where we need to improve, and to implement those improvements.
--just MHO

Re:Not FUD, Fuel

[gavinhall]

Posted by Synsthe:

Microsoft understands that Linux is a threat. They are allocating resources to deal with it. Don't turn your back on them.

And this is exactly what will give linux the edge to catch up in any area's it's lacking. MS has one objective: Destroy competition. They can't have that, it's too hard on them to actually compete fairly. This is not good. They must do away with the competition.

Linux, on the other hand, has no such ideal - the developers working on it, don't give a rat's ass about trying to "destroy MS" (however a lot of slashdotter's, various trolls from each side, and the likes, seem to have that as a target). While MS is expending resources and wasting time trying to do in Linux, Linux continually improves right under all the pressure.

Like I've said before, neither should "win"; a marketplace without competition stagnates. However by taking this stance, they're just giving Linux the time it needs to narrow any gaps.

--
Mark Waterous (mark@projectlinux.org)

Re:Not FUD, Fuel

[remande]

Micro$oft is now convinced that they are #1, and Linux will never be able to compete.

Don't you believe it.

If Microsoft thought that Linux would never be able to compete, they wouldn't have bothered to publish the test results. They think that Linux is so popular that bad press is better than no press; that it is no longer under the radar. Never believe that a company's marketing reflects the internal realities; that goes double for Microsoft.

As near as I can figure, Microsoft sees Linux as the new platform threat, and will deal with Linux accordingly. If they're smart, they will realize that FUD cannot destroy Linux, but can certainly slow it down. When MS markets a commercial product out of existence, the war has a limited duration and is over when the product's vendor pulls it. Since nobody can pull Linux, marketing and FUD wars could last for decades. But in the meantime, MS may find it useful to slow Linux growth until they can organize a better defense.

If we're lucky, MS will be stupid and try to FUD us to death. Linux can beat any FUD, because it has more long-term viability than any proprietary software; we have forever to make Linux kick ass. I'm not going to count on that, however; MS shipped all their stupid people to federal court.

They may be able to embrace and extend popular protocols (like TCP). They can put their proprietary ware on top of the open source Linux kernel, though they can't do much to the kernel itself. One interesting strategy might be to port Win32 to Linux as Microsoft payware. Thus, they get to collect their tax as you install MS-Office onto your corporate Linux desktop. I don't know if this approach would be beneficial or harmful to them.

Microsoft understands that Linux is a threat. They are allocating resources to deal with it. Don't turn your back on them.

Wieghing your decision

[gavinhall]

Posted by grabes:

I dont get it anymore. Now I will say that speed is a major part in choosing an OS. I work for a company we run all BSDI systems, and unfortunately 1 NT box. That NT box only hosts approx 75 web sites. Everytime someone publishes a page to that thing I can hear the drive grind from across the room. It has 256 megs of ram. It has what I like to call the spiraling windows syndrome. Where its really fast when you first install it and then it justs keeps getting slower and slower. However I am getting away from my main point. I have never judged NT to be a good operating system. For a server you need good Remote administation (Linux excellent NT virtually none). You need support (Linux excellent NT 1900 billme). I run Linux personally and I have no complaints I like it much better then the $1000 BSDI I also use. However older unix lovers are hard to sway from there personal choice. Now Im not a C expert, but if the major kernel developers would pull together I think we could have a kick ass os by the end of the year but thats in a perfect world. Instead be will sit here and cry about it for a few more weeks.

Re:M$ Biased reporting. Follow the money!

[gavinhall]

Posted by Synsthe:

>You know, it's really funny to see all these
>Linux Advocates tossing out FUD just like their
>MS adversaries do.

It's a common occurrence here on slashdot, as I'm sure you already know. =)

Yup, it's true NT beat linux, but NT beat linux in benchmarks only; How long was each server up? A few minutes or hours before they ran each benchmark? What would happen if they ran the same after each had been up for a few weeks? What about after intensive use for a few weeks, the same kind a high traffic server might undergo? What about if halfway through you decided to install some new software? How'd they turn out then?

Point being, benchmarks, although they give you an outward look at things, don't give you the real picture. They're only a very small part of the equation, and they cannot compare stability, or anything of the like.

They can however show some areas where Linux needs improvement; good for them - because the developers working on Linux actually take heed to such things and do their best to improve areas that are lacking.

--
Mark Waterous (mark@projectlinux.org)

The truth be known...

[gavinhall]

Posted by rdobbs:

I've seen soooo many posting about subject where the author has made it glaringly clear he or she doesn't even know what they are talking about - and they then lye and make up credentials to back it up.

Well, I'm not lying - and I'm not about to claim I know everything... But, here's a little info about me before I start smashing myths and urban legends:

I am 22, and work as 3rd Shift Systems Operator at a Major Life Insurance firm. I'm a high school graduate, with the following certifications:

* MCP - Implementing and Supporting Windows 95
* CNA - Certified Novell Administrator - Netware v3.12
* A+ - Industry Standard in Computer Technician training. Proved proficient in MS/DOS, and basic PC Hardware

...And I have the following working experience in the following systems:

-Macintosh (PowerPC)
-MacOS 8.6
-PCs
-FreeBSD 2.2.2Release
-RedHat Linux 4.2
-RedHat Linux 5.0
-RedHat Linux 6.0
-MS/DOS
-OS/2 2.1
-OS/2 3.0
-OS/2 4.0
-Windows 3.1
-Windows For Workgroups 3.11
-Windows NT Server3.51
-Windows 95
-Windows 98
-Windows NT Workstation 4.0
-Windows NT Server 4.0
-RS/6000 (PowerPC)
-AIX 4.2
-AS/400
-OS/400
-S/390
-MVS

Whew... With that out of the way...

• RAIDS:

I've seen a few people question the reason to even test RAID performance on Linux, as it is a current weak spot. Big business uses RAID technology to support heavy load, and to break up the work of the filesystem among a group of equally capable drives. So it IS a feasible test - and just proves that Linux needs improvement in this department.

• Multiple Network Cards:

A few people have said that there is no REAL life application for Multiple NICS. Linux's support for Multiple NIC cards is still premature - but it's promising (from what I can tell). I've built machines, and also maintained machines with multiple network cards - it IS a real-life factor. Another area of improvement...

• Single Processors vs SMP:

Businesses will only use Single Processing machines - unless they are doing database related applications, or other heavy CPU-utilizing activity, then they will usually spare no expense to get the proper machine. Linux has primative support for SMP - but NT has better support. Linux needs to improve, so what.

• Stability and Scalability:

These are both important issues in the business world. Linux currently has pretty good ground as it comes to stability. However, both NT and Linux get pounded by Solaris (so I've heard) - again, a learning experience...

I could go on and on and on... But why bother...

I use RedHat Linux 6.0, as well as Windows NT, Windows 98, and even MacOS. Each platform has it's own strength and weaknesses - and any honest-to-goodness computer professional stakes his/her career on this Maxum. Don't get caught in the hype war - cause it will only lead down the road to eventual failure...

Ray D.

PS: I will probably get flammed for this - but as I have learned - that is really the only thing left of the "Professional PC Person" world... Maybe I should have become a doctor? :P

Re:What all of this really means. Linux is for rea

[gavinhall]

Posted by rdobbs:

Bravo! Level-headedness in a forum of Chaos! :)

LINUX IS _FREE_! _OPEN_SOURCE_! COMPARED TO $500!

[gavinhall]

Posted by airborn603:

Most wouldn't expect much from an open source
OS compared to an over $500 "workstation", even
if it is made by Microsoft. Therefore, Linux
is incredible compared to NT, and all those tests
by Microsoft-owned-or-hired companies about "Linux
being slow", etc., should not affect the
GNU\Linux\UFie\Anti-MS community in any way.
* - I suspect that some people at ZD don't know
this and continue to write columns about the bugs
in IE5.

Linux Vs NT

[gavinhall]

Posted by The Technical Revolutionary:

Linux hasn't lost anything. Last time I checked I wasn't running Linux because it had the fastest web server, and I could care less how fast Samba is. We need to stop chasing Microsofts tail here! Microsoft is just trying to pull linux into their overbloated Marketing/benchmark/it don't matter if it works as long as it looks good on paper world! Linux is a good, free, stable and open minded/open source operating system. Its OK if they clean up some problems in the code, but not without forgetting what Linux is all about!!

Re:Gotta start winning these.. c'mon, coders

[gavinhall]

Posted by saberk:

I agree... This whole benchmarking shit is very annoying... The only thing Linux can claim now is stability. And can someone tell me who let the world know that Linux is faster than NT before testing and benchmarking it. Our (Linux) ass is kicked just because we claimed to be faster and now M$ is "proving" that it's not the case... Maybe it's time to focus more on tuning.

Re:4 net cards realistic?

[Chaostrophy]

Exactly. I read somewere (link from lwn.net?) of someone who had done a series of tests, and found that Linux does not perform well on load balencing across multiple NICs. With a single gigabit NIC, Linux would have done better, how much better, or how much better NT might have done, I don't have any idea.

Re:exact same URL as "NT beats Linux: again"

[Acy James Stapp]

It was probably reposted so those who read /. during the week can see it.

URL does not work

[Aki Laukkanen]

I know I entered the correct URL but Slashdot keeps adding an extra space in there. Just remove the extra character and it should work.

Time to own up and be adults

[Kostya]

Ok, the results are in. The benchmarks, when administered properly, show that NT outperforms Linux in every category.

We now need to prove the open source model instead of confusing the issue by nursing our bruised egos. I'm already seeing the "denial" posts that hark back to OS/2 days. "Well, they may have gotten better numbers in this, but that doesn't really matter." Yadda, yadda, yadda. What is wrong with you people? Can't you accept the results? Quit playing games and start making progress.

Some would love to argue with me until they are blue in the face about how this doesn't mean NT's better, etc. Fine. That is NOT what I'm talking about. The benchmark has exposed an architectural flaw/oversight. We need to fix this in order to reach the performance numbers we need to be a server operating system. So let's do it. Let's fix it. Start downloading and start coding.

I have linux installed on every one of my file servers. I will be able to fend off the criticism for now. I have faith in out community and in our talent. However, if we continue pointless arguements and pulpit pounding about how linux really is better, instead of making sure that it IS better, we're sunk!

And if you can't code, you can always test. Get involved. This is your operating system.

"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs."

Re:Time to own up and be adults

[Thomas Charron]

Finally, a voice of reason.. We got our rears kicked. Now, to fix it and come back stronger..

Re:Time to own up and be adults

[opencode]

I will be able to fend off the criticism for now. I have faith in out community and in our talent.

The "faith in our community" is indeed the unspoken trump card to our success. Like it or not, Microsoft has mastered this, and could sell it in bottles if they needed to.

Re:Reality check:

[Thomas Charron]

This guy also needs to do some more research on some things..

A) Why would anyone use Samba on a T1 line? Samba is a file server, the majority of which are used to serve files via a LAN, NOT a WAN. LAN speeds go from 2 (10Base2) to 1,000 (Gigabit ether).

B) The speed limit on I-93 is 65. I have 2 cars, a Ford Taurus, and a Porche. Both can do the speed limit, little over every onmce and a while, EASILY.. Which do I choose WHEN COST is NOT the issue? (I am NOT saying that NT is a Porche, but the tests make the comparisons look simular)

Re:Actually, That's Linux => 1, Mindcraft => 0

[Thomas Charron]

The test was not as screwed as you made it out to be.. They had SIMULAR results. The first test didn't tune Linux as well.. BIG DEAL.. Linux got it's but kicked from a technical standpoint, hands down.. It's a sad day, but I was afraid that this is EXACTLY what was going to happen..

Re:NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[Thomas Charron]

A) Scripting:

Please do a little more research.. ALL of these are available on NT already. Oh, and (*PPSSSTT*) Activestate is working with Perl and Perl alone. If you want bash, sed, awk, grep, and all of the toys, you should be kissing cygnus.. Oh, and did I mention gcc is there as well? ;-P

B) X thru a 28.8 Line? You'[re lying really bad if you say that it's any better then ANY sort of dial up remote admin for NT.. MANY systems can be admined via telnet. And most of NT can be admined from a web browser (As can Linux)

C) WWW Server Migration: Mute point, nothing to do with OSes here.. Just servers.. I can go from Apache/Linux to Apache/NT with no problem. Does NT now rock? ;-P

D) A sysadmin who say's 'Like Unix or AS/400's' scares the hell outa me.. Lemme set you strait.. Unix = OS type. AS/400 = Hardware Platform. As of last month, I worked at UPS, who had the largest installed base of RS/600's and AS/400's in the friggen world, so please don't try to impress me. Also, 3 years and working as a sysadmin designing a multimillion dollar ecommerce project. Doesn't add up.

Re:Gotta start winning these.. c'mon, coders

[Thomas Charron]

The problems that people are finding have nothing to do with what your saying.. Linux hits a 200 mbit limit, along with approx 2,000 transaction limit. The has to do with task scheduling, and the NON multitasking IP stack..

Re:porche vs. ford

[Thomas Charron]

I disagree.. If NT is percieved as being able to 'handle more' then Linux, then people will want the system that they feel 'can do more'. Same reason why there's so many jeeps, trucks, and sports cars. People don't NEED them, but they percieve that they need to buy what can 'do more'.

Re:ZD is partly owned by MS?!?!

[Enahs]

I always wondered this back in the days when WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, etc. etc. ad infinitum, ruled the small business world. ZD pubs always pushed Micro$~1 apps instead.

A thought...

[Enahs]

A souped up '68 Camaro will get you from NY to LA much faster than a '99 Kia will...

...but your chance of death is much greater in the Camaro.

Re:FOUL! Unfair filesystem usage in tests!

[Mark Pitman]

Actually, it was not striped across a set of drives. It was 4 partitions on the same drive. That is a BIG difference. And, I don't think it was unfair for MS to do that. They are using standard features of the OS to optimize it.

Why did they use SAMBA?

[!Xabbu]

I'm no Linux guru and will be the first to admit that I am just a few notches over the knowledge level of a windows 9* luser... But is Samba not mostly for use in connecting Linux boxes to Windows shares? If your serving up a bunch of pages wouldn't it make much more sense to use NFS or something that is more native to the operating system for sharing between machines on a LAN? Again... I'm no Linux Guru.. just a mildly advanced user. (very mildy advanced).

Re:Why did they use SAMBA?

[Ares]

Nope. Samba is meant to allow Linux and other various OS's to create shares which Windows clients can then use.

Re:Linux geeks humbled - sort of

[Rene S. Hollan]

One thing the Linux community forgets is just how STOOOPID the average person is. And, no I won't tone down the arrogance. Here's why:

These tests suggest the equaivalent of "my car will beat your car in a drag race". Pitty, since many of us thought it wouldn't, but facts is facts.

The problem is that we have an analogous situation where those that need to find a reliable car to get to and from work daily decide which car to by on the basis of which one would likely win a drag race. Hence, STOOOPID.

Certainly, the problems identified can, and should, be fixed. They don't strike me as biggies, actually. Unfortunately, M$ will leverage this for all it's worth, and the idiots out there will believe them. Let us not get caught up trying to perform damage control. Our response should be, "Yeah, yeah, whatever -- if you want M$, then buy M$. Me, I still wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole."

Smart money already knows that the better deal is, or will very shortly will be.

GNU and Linux have always shone when it came to helping the little guy, and the big guy will continue to throw money away. Money can buy a lot of ignorance.

Re:4.4lite?

[softweyr]

More like the FreeBSD folks know that it hits the same limitations as Linux. FreeBSD, like Linux, is a work in progress. Both will overcome this hurdle and continue to be better than NT in many ways.

May the source be with you!

Okay, so NT smokes Linux with several NICs...

[Ralph]

...but you might want to read an "objective" Test done by the german magazine "c't".

The (yep!) english article can be found here.

Sorry, there is no (I wonder why) german page available, the results can be found in c't 13/99 on pages 186 and following.

Short summary: This test shows, that Linux+Apache outperforms NT as a webserver if there is only one NIC to handle. It also shows, that the number of processors daoesn't matter that much, when using Linux as the host sytsem for apache.
NT runs much better than Apache on Linux, when more then one NIC has to be served - which might be the result of not having a multi-threaded IP-stack under Linux.

Read ;-)

Ralph

I'd still rather use Linux...

[Mickey Jameson]

Does this test take into consideration real-world applications? Sure, you can beat on any machine for 5 days and hope it doesn't crash. What would happen to the NT machine in 10 days? 20 days? Would it BSoD itself to oblivion? From my experiences, it would, while the Linux box would still be chugging away.
In any rate, even if NT is a little bit faster, I'd still run Linux, because in the long run, Linux DOES have the edge in overall performance. Linux doesn't crash for no reason. Linux doesn't require a reboot every x days to keep itself happy.
When I reboot a machine, it's because I want to, not because I have to.

Re:porche vs. ford

[hany]

while car can be used as exhibit, computers ussualy not. so when byuing car and money are not an idssue, then you buy car which you like better. but when buying computer and money are no issue then still you have to buy computer which can do what you want and which do it the way you want.

Re:porche vs. ford

[hany]

while car can be used as exhibit, computers ussualy not. so when buying car and money are not an idssue, then you buy car which you like better. but when buying computer and money are no issue then still you have to buy computer which can do what you want and which do it the way you want.

Re:porche vs. ford

[hany]

yeah, my assumption is that people are thinkink about what they are doing. but mostly it looks like inappropriate assumption :)

and here we have the main problem with this benchmark (and maybe all other benchmarks): benchmark tels the people that "in this particular setup doing this particular thing is product X better Ytimes than product Z". and people takes it as "product X is always Ytimes better than product Z".

Re:not if you have more then one CPU

[Dastardly]

Multithreading could help with a single CPU and multiple NICs. A single thread could get blocked waiting for I/O, in this case a second thread could use the CPU to service requests from another NIC. Whether this is really adavantageous depends on a lot of factors including whether the IP code ever does block, and what other things can be done when one IP thread is blocked (what resources are locked during the blocking).

Dastardly

Everybody wins!

[robbo]

The best lesson to be learned about this exercise is that we all benefit from the showdown between NT and Linux. Regardless of who "wins" the benchmark tests, we can quickly pinpoint the weaknesses of each os and fix them. Even NT users will benefit, if MS can react in a timely fashion. This is clear support for the DOJ's case against MS, and support for open source development. I'm looking forward to the next showdown- bring 'em on!

The Real World

[Gray]

I think of it like this..

Do you know any sysadmins that have switched to NT from Linux(or anything else for that matter) of their own free will? I don't.

People only use NT because their either afraid of Linux (no crime there) or pointy heads make them.

Maybe my impressions are wrong, but so far, everything I've seen and done indicated that once you've gone over to *nix, you never want to go back..

Not to mention the other(more common) end of the spectrum. I'd like to see some benchmarks for P133's with 64 megs of RAM, or 486-66s for that matter..

My little server is a cyrix 166 with 32 megs, and I only upgraded it from a 486-66 because I wanted to play mp3s...

Re:The Real World

[kkreamer]

This is exactly the thing I'm afraid of. I think Microsoft's future FUD factory will be pointed square at pointy-hair types. Microsoft would love a future where everyone has to run NT because the pointy-hair bosses make them. The problem with Linux (or anything, for that matter) is if someone tries it once and if turned off to it (for whatever reason), they probably will never go back to it; hell, they'll probably avoid it.

The thing that could hurt Linux the most right now is if everyone pushed Linux really hard now, especially for desktops. Then all of the pointy-hair bosses (as well as Joe Shmoe Window User) try Linux and decide that they don't like it because of .... (whatever reason). Then they never go back to it again.

Something to consider.

[cthonious]

It seems that Micros~1 inspected the linux code and found a weakness. They then publicized a benchmark that exploited that weakness. Good strategy.

Will linux ever win benchmarks against NT if Micros~1 just benchmarks NT against linux's weaknesses? They will just find another one.

The good side is that Micros~1 is actually funding linux development by finding weaknesses. Perhaps linux will one day be perfect and there won't be any weaknesses left :-).
The bad part is that linux may never win any benchmarks, since only Micros~1 can afford to test them.

Eg., why haven't we seen a gigabit ethernet benchmark?

Re:4 net cards realistic?

[edgy]

This is a very important issue.

A German Computer magazine c't did benchmarks with Linux against Windows NT and found that Linux trounced NT in every case except when Linux had multiple ethernet cards.

If you're using Linux as a workgroup or departmental server, there's no point in having multiple ethernet cards in it. In those cases, Linux is still faster.

The smart reseller benchmarks show just how much faster Linux is when you're dealing with situations that most businesses will have to deal with.

Reality check:

[malraux]

http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/mstest.ht ml

Kinda puts the whole shebang into perspective. Watch out for the twist of irony at the end.



Regards,

Re:Reality check:

[chicken]

This isn't a reality check ... because you missed an obvious application: intranets.

6 T1's is not as fast as 10 MBit ethernet ... but many servers are connected to 100 Mb, or Gb ethernet. At that point, your bottleneck are going to be:

a) The internal IO architecture of the server harware.
b) Processor speed and blocking within the application (multi-threading in the kernel).

The web-server example was contrived ... unless you're running a site like yahoo (top 1% of servers), a web server serving external clients won't bog the system.

The test should have been done with a database server (Oracle for NT and linux) or a Notes server (also available for both). Then there's a better mix of processors/drive access/network.

Re:Reality check:

[igjeff]

You kind of hit on a good point here...lemme elaborate on it a bit more...you also kind of missed a point. :)

You say a web server serving external clients won't bog the system...that's not exactly true...but it bogs the system for a different reason.

The benchmarks were run with directly connected networks, no routing, no wan links, etc. What does this mean to how the typical web hit is processed? The typical web hit on a benchmark is (I would guess...don't have real numbers here...educated guesses) about 1 to 2 seconds long...the connection is made...the data is passed very rapidly because you're dealing with 100Mbps pipes all the way through, no routing, etc., and the connection is shut down.

In a typical Internet web serving situation, each hit will be much longer lived. How long does it take, start to finish, to load a typical web page on a typical v.90 modem connection? 30 seconds? a minute? I may be high on these numbers, but the idea stands...its not going to be (for the most part) a 1 or 2 second connection duration.

With the longer duration connections, you're going to have more apache processes running (remember, you have one apache process per hit...and apache processes aren't typically small), you're going to have kernel structures allocated, etc.

The meaning of all this being...that 1 processor 256 MB RAM box, is likely *not* going to even get close to serving 6 t1's worth of data to typical Internet clients before it falls over.

To generalize that further...while this benchmark has exposed some limitations of Linux in serving large amounts of data...and this guy's article does give some good perspective on it...don't take his conclusions on how much a linux box will serve without a grain of salt...yes, he does acknowledge that dynamic content has a huge affect on the serving...but that's not all that affects it.

Yet another posting to point out the goofiness of benchmarks...yes, they have their uses, but they're pretty limited.

Jeff

Re:Reality check:

[PugMajere]

LAN speeds go from 2 (10Base2) to 1,000 (Gigabit ether)

By the way, 10Base2 = 10Megabit on COAX. 10BaseT is 10 Megabit on Unshielded Twisted Pair.

That's why 100Megabit cards are known as 100Base-TX or 100Base-something. (I forget what the other standard is called.)

This doesn't really have any relevance to the topic, but I hate to see misinformation get spread.

Re:Reality check:

[dev_null]

http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/mstest.ht ml

Excellent response to the tests.

Re:Maybe there is another principal a work

[arielb]

Again with the free beer stuff? If NT is faster -whether because of performance or cost of training is lower because it's easier to use- then it saves money. Time is money too.

Nope, I think this was quite fair

[Sesse]

Seriously... This was supposed to be a fair test, and until the RH team that was attending (and configuring the Linux machines for) the test says otherwise, we'll have to accept that.

However, I think a Mindcraft III would fare _much_ better now. The fixes from Mindcraft I didn't come in in time for Mindcraft II (see an older article on Slashdot), and now the RH guys found even more things to fix. In addition, as the article pointed out, Apache is getting better, too. (What about Boa, or any other single-threaded web server, BTW?)

Sorry, folks, this was a fair test, at least when it comes to biasing. However, as I've said, Linux was a bit unlucky with the time and date. (Microsoft, on the other hand, had already made their improvements, based on the data from the previous tests... Guess they've invested a lot of money in fixing it quickly...)

All in all, however, this was a (minor) win for Linux -- the results was nowhere near Mindcraft I, even with Microsoft's new improvements.

/* Steinar */

Re:Nope, I think this was quite fair

[Black Blade]

And, if you believe the results, pointing out any deficiencies in Linux's network subsystem or IP stack can only help improve Linux's performance in the future.

Multithreading

[Sesse]

To me, multithreading here just looks like a `buzzword', to explain something more difficult to the end readers.

Please get this right: A well-written, single-threaded function will beat (or equal) an equally well-written, multi-threaded function in _all_ cases, simply because somebody has to do the switch between threads (processes) in all cases. In the multithreaded version, the OS/CPU has to do it. _Multithreading_ _doesn't_ _mean_ _extra_ _speed!_ (That's why I wrote my single-threaded FTP daemon, BetaFTPD (search Freshmeat for it if you're interested). Now, just had to pull the plug for my own (GPL'ed) `product'... Don't make that affect your judgement, please...)

Now, got it right? :-)

/* Steinar */

Re:Multithreading

[Sesse]

First off, spawning a thread is a very lightweight operation when compared to fork()'ing a child as most web servers do (including apache).
And not spawning off a thread is an even more ligthweight operation! I'm not saying that Apache does it right (even Linus has said they don't).

/* Steinar */

Re:Multithreading

[mpe]

To me, multithreading here just looks like a
`buzzword', to explain something more difficult
to the end readers


Is "multithreading" even the issue here, IMHO it
looks far more like NT is assigning a NIC (and
an area of memory) to a specific processor. Thus
ensuring that there are no issues of contention
(in terms of more than one processors attempting
to service a NIC, or associated queues.)

Just out of interest has anyone benchmarked NT
as a router?

Re:Blocking

[Sesse]

-> Process A requests a read() from hard drive 1. The kernel blocks A and begins handling the read.

Well, you see, Linux and all other Unixes have a non-blocking flag on every file descriptor... It's called FIONBIO.

/* Steinar */

Re:not if you have more then one CPU

[Sesse]

Yes, of course, but as far as I understood the article, this was true for the uni-CPU version, too.

BTW, isn't 4 Ethernet cards a bit unrealistic? Wouldn't a single gigabit card be much better?

/* Steinar */

Oh, I forgot :-)

[Sesse]

Remember that every process (as you referred to, threads are only lightweight processes, also on Linux) takes up additional memory. Less memory for cache, or ultimately more usage of swapfile.

/* Steinar */

Re:Blocking

[Sesse]

But doesn't this make the code more complicated than it would be if it were multithreaded?

Yes, and that's why almost all server daemons today are multithreaded (often via a fork(), or via inetd). But the complicated code has to be somewhere, remember. With this step, you get much more control about what is executed where, and you can share much more code among the processes. This, combined with a lot of other things, keeps the memory requirements down, for one thing. Instead of a whole new process, you'll need a couple hundred bytes to hold the information.

To sum it up: Yes, the code is getting more complicated, but I think it's worth it. Much of the same framework can be shared between applications, also, so it's not so much work as you'd expect. The only thing that gets slightly more difficult is the command parsing -- if you miss a char, you can't just issue a (blocking) getchar() and wait :-)

/* Steinar */

Re:Time to do your research

[Malachi]

One word: eBay

Malachi

Re:NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[TeeJay(TheJackal)]

>> FUD, FUD, FUD.... >> NT has no useful scripting, Linux has everything you can ever need > Windows scripting host will let you do almost anything using either VBScript or Javascript. There is also Perl for Win32. hmm.. Windows NT scripting is still far behind that of Linux/unix, even the most hardened NT advocates recognise that. Windows scripting host can't compete with BASH,ZSH,(non-alien)Perl, AWK,SED,etc etc. Thats why ActiveState are being funded by Microsoft, they have a lot of catching up to do (but respect to them cos I couldn't face not having Perl when I use NT)

>> you cannot remote administer NT (Im not talking about fast connections here, (where you could use VNC), try to administer NT over a modem line. Good luck) > I've used both PC-Duo and Carbon Copy to do remote NT administration just fine over a 28.8 line. Hmm.. like you'd get those thru a halfway decent firewall. I have to go down 5 floors to admin our servers from the console because no remote admin tools were included and being a lowly System Administrator I wouldn't be able to get funding for a remote admin tool let alone get it through our firewall.
Sorry but NT lags sooo... far behind on this one, I can use X thru secure shell from a trusted host with x.509 certifate authentication to my linux box - in fact I haven't touched my linux boxes keyboard since I moved it into a different office.

>> once youve made your decision to use IIS, youre completly stuck when it comes to changing to another type of webserver, or sometimes even when you want to transfer sites from on IIS to another I've never had any problem with that... the MS tool works well, and its not like on a Linux box you can move seamlessly from Apache to Zeus, for instance. I have - it can (not necessarily always is) be a pig, any move can be damned horrid, but in my experience so far UNIX (linux/aix) stuff is simpler to migrate because I am in more control.

To put this in context I am working on a multimillion dollar e-commerce project using NT,AS/400s and RS/6000's. If we had used unix or as/400's instead of NT/intel it would have been completed by now and more scalable to boot.

I have been administering unix for several years and have 2 years + 1 year industrial placement of my BSc Honours Degree in Computer Systems & Networks under my belt so I know what I am talking about.

A.

NT vs. Linux

[tsikora]

Why was RedHat chosen? A proven stable Linux server setup by a Linux professional would have been a fairer representation. In my experience the workhorse of Linux has always been the Slackware server. Even Caldera or SuSE would have been a better choice. The NT machine was tweaked by NT professionals so why not at our end. RedHat is not exactly known for it's installation ease and stability and usually requires a higher degree of expertise so the test was handicapped right from the start.

Re:Distribution is irrelevant

[tsikora]

How can you say that. The library differences alone make or break it. Let's see we have libc5 5.3.12 vs 5.4.46 / glibc 2.07 vs 2.1.1 Bind v4 or bind v8 Where all the apps compiled for the current libraries, dynamic or static? Static libraries consume less memory hence are more effecient but are larger. (FreeBSD one of the proven performers is a-out.(2.2.8)) The amount of differences are staggering and their effect on performance absolutely critical but that's the beauty of Linux. Build it your way.

I wish it were frivolous

[Mr Z]

I would be inclined to agree with you, if it weren't for the fact that the PHBs and bean counters are trying to pick between NT and Linux.

If the management types are asking the question "NT or Linux", then why shouldn't the Linux community be interested in any data that could sway somebody's answer?

The "right way", of course, is to pick the OS and software that does exactly what you need, etc. etc. Unfortunately, for arbitrarily complex real world situations, with arbitrarily complex management, personnel and customer pressures, there isn't always the time to find the "perfect" system. So, instead people rely on benchmarks, press reviews, word-of-mouth, etc. And also, unfortunately, management often trusts the word of the outside world more than the word of its own employees. (Sometimes, there are seemingly rational reasons for doing so, such as "suppliers X, Y, and Z provide more solutions for platform A than platform B, which is more important to me than the fact that Frank prefers platform B because 'he likes it better,'" neverminding the reasons why Frank might like it better.) And so, monitoring the press and actually responding constructively (eg. fixing performance problems, etc) is a good thing.

The key, of course, is to keep sight of what matters. Lets not get trapped into optimizing things that don't actually matter. For instance, optimizing Apache for utter speed while compromising stability would be a bad thing. Or worse, bloating the kernel with benchmark specific tweaks, etc. (After all, isn't that how Microsoft attains its legendary (lack of) stability?) Remember, while these sorts of highly-publicized benchmarks may point out some weak points, they also could just be serving as chaff to block the real threats from our radar screen.

Perhaps that was the idea you were trying to get across, AC?

--Joe

--

SCSI disconnect

[Mr Z]

Isn't this the exact behavior that SCSI disconnects are supposed to help?

I'm pretty sure the kernel doesn't block waiting for the I/O to complete. It issues the request to the device and puts the blocked task to sleep while it goes about handling Everything Else TM.

Now, in the case of IDE, if both drives are on the same IDE chain, you're going to block waiting for the device driver. If they're on different chains, then they can run independently.

--Joe

--

Re:Blocking

[ajf]

Well, you see, Linux and all other Unixes have a non-blocking flag on every file descriptor... It's called FIONBIO.

But doesn't this make the code more complicated than it would be if it were multithreaded?

Linux over MS

[eponymous cohort]

When people choose to dump their MS OS and go with Linux, I've never heard "because Linux serves more pages per second than NT" given as a reason.

The reasons are usually one of the following:

Better Stability
Tired of being locked into MS-only solutions
No license fees
Doesn't need an expensive hardware upgrade
No annoying features like animated paperclips
Linux doesn't pretend to be smarter than you, and then fail at it.
No registry which causes more pain and grief than it actually solves.

It doesn't really matter than NT beats Linux in this test. Sure we should fix the problems, but NT is still NT with all the liabilities which it has become famous for.

Re:Linux over MS

[Clark Kent]

You forgot the reason that was most important for me:

The investment you make in application software won't suddenly become worthless with the next release of the O/S.

With Linux, compatibility is a primary goal, and sabotage is unheard of.

Who cares about static page delivery?!

[Fozz]

Both the PC Week and Mindcraft test prove NT can outperform Linux at static webpage delivery. But this is not interesting to me. Most website development I'm involved with involves dynamic webpage delivery.

Without a doubt, Linux (or any Unix-like system) would squish NT into the dirt if they tested dynamic content generation... especially if they did it with CGI. By design, NT is process-heavy and has considerable more overhead to deal with when forking processes (i.e. CGI scripts).

While I agree the Linux and Apache coders have some work to do to get static delivery up to and past the performance of NT, I'd like to see some numbers for dynamic content delivery (the reason I use Linux and not much else).

Re:Who cares about static page delivery?!

[blowdart]

Yea but if you have any kind of sense what so ever you don't run CGI under NT, you run ASP or ISAPI. That way you lose the overheads concerned with spawning off a new process each time you try to execute CGI.

Delivering dynamic pages depends on lots of things, speed of the database if you're using one, underlying scripting method, if it's Perl/CGI, VBScript/ASP, C/CGI or C/ISAPI.

Dynamic benchmarks would be interesting, but I doubt you could get anywhere near a level playing field on both sides to make them comparable.

Barry

They mentioned ASP...

[Avus]

in the article, and acknowledged this problem:

After having dealt with static pages, both systems also needed to prove their ability to handle dynamic contents. The smallest common denominator for tasks of this kind is the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). [...]
Of course, this configuration is not first choice for generating dynamic HTML pages on a Windows system. An NT administrator would normally prefer Active Server Pages (ASP) and VBScript, which is why these results should rather be read like a CGI or Perl usability test for NT than a proper system comparison. Since Microsoft's solution isn't portable to other systems we unfortunately couldn't make the reverse comparison. And the figures for CGI and ASP aren't really comparable due to theirentirely different underlying concepts.

But the main point is the overall impression. It's a much more differentiated view than the other tests. Particulatly interesting are IMHO IIS's problems with delayed requests (3 sec). This seems to be the downside of the threading approach.

Re:C'T magazine did their own tests...

[Avus]

Could you please be more precise?
C't is always biased in favor of the more advanced technology (guess what the "t" in c't stands for), and that means they are open to BeOS, Linux/*BSD, (in earlier times) OS/2, and, as they try to be comprehensive, MacOS (X and below).

As for the c't tests, I've yet to find someone who proves serious factual errors therein.
On the contrary, c't tests tend to be very sophisticated and neutral. No wonder, as c't employs the best computer tech journalists in the German-speaking world, probably even world wide.
Maybe you'd recall

PIII proc ID software switch by processor guru Andreas Stiller,

the SoftRam scandal, where everybody from APC to ZiffDavis hailed this as an ingenious way to get cheap 'Software' RAM, until c't examined that the company had just put non-functional (unused) code to the standart MS libraries...

Well there are many other things I could mention, but in general it's save to say c't is one of the best computer mags worldwide, certainly the best I know (and I know quite a number of US/UK/french ones as well).

Re:M$ Biased reporting. Follow the money!

[Mike Buddha]

You know, it's really funny to see all these Linux Advocates tossing out FUD just like their MS adversaries do.

I've been reading PC Week for almost a year now, and I don't find it to be particularly biased in either direction. I use both Linux and NT on my home and work machines, so I'm not an MS crony (as I'm sure I'll be accused of in reply).

I'd have to say that the tests were fair and NT beat Linux. The first set of un-audited tests weren't. I believe their results are true. No amount of FUD from this community can dissuade me.

Re: ext2fs (was: .. filesystem usage in tests!..)

[Mapc]

It's well known that ext2fs is slow, unefficient,
non-scalable, and not very fault tolerant.
I'm not surprised at all.
What is surprising is that linux ip stack which was supposed to be very efficient, was proven to be very uneffective.
It's interesting how would FreeBSD deal with such load, FFS or vinum are much faster filesystems, and BSD stack is much more effecient. We'll see..

Re:append="mem=256M"

[Menelik]

I know. i have 2 servers right here with uptimes
in the hundreds of days. I only recently noticed that they were only using 64 MB when there was 128 MB of RAM.
In 2.2 Kernels i can testify that problem is no more.

Re:Frivolous post . . . yada yada yada.

[cjs]

Why do you BSD posters commonly act holier than thou?

Think about how you feel when Windows NT is `in the limelight' in some area even though Linux is a technically better solution.

Ok, now you know how the BSD folks feel when Linux gets the limelight even in circumstances where a BSD is the technically better solution.

There's no real reason that Linux should be in the front of everybody's minds, and BSD hardly heard of at all. It's just marketing; Linux folks are a lot louder than BSD folks.

cjs

Quotes from "Pirates of Silicon Valley"

[doulos]

I like how the exchange went between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates just as Jobs realizes that Bill had stolen from the ideas that Jobs had stolen from Xerox:

Jobs says: "Our stuff is better..."
Gates replies: "Your missing the point. THAT does'nt matter..." (something like that anyway :)

Cool irony huh?

Re:Quotes from "Pirates of Silicon Valley"

[Dharma]

Funny you mention that. This whole thing reminded me of that scene as well.

Now what we need to do is succeed where Apple failed... By proving that quality *does* matter.

Question about this test...

[Dark Fire]

I have heard that Windows NT uses a BSD stack. That technology has been around for a while. Now Linux networking code derives from a similar background. How can their be such a performance different if Bill (gates) snagged BSD code? Could someone please explain this to me. I may not have my facts straight. Also, NT uses 7 mb MINIMUM just to load (according to NTLDR) + cpu time to run the gui + disk access time for virtual memory. Is their gui so well written that it minimizes the usage of such system resources? Well, I am a computer tech & I have seen what NT can do. I optimized an NT system where I work & later, I installed 95 on the same system & optimized it (disk cache sizing, vm adjustments, path/file cache, etc.). You would think the Pentium 200 I set it up on was a Pentium 100 running NT (32mb ram/3.2gb disk). I know NT should probably have more disk & double or quadruple the ram, but why? Why do you need such a beefy system just to run the stupid operating system. Why a gui? It will just sit their most of the time doing nothing but wasting resources. How can NT still come out on top? I want some answers.

Come on, we have to get better, not whine

[Hammer]

This was probably a pretty unbiased test.

Now, instead of whinig and bitching, lets get serious and fix the problems. This is not the last time "Bills Boys" beat us, but if we keep on whining instead of fixing the problems we may just give up here and now! We have to remember a few important things;

1) There is no such thing as bugfree S/W. Linux is good but not perfect.

2) Linux and OSF/FSF has com a long way in a short time. Let's not loose focus now.

3) "Bills Boys" will of course look at this and try to be even better where Linux is deficient.

4) Linux is _way_ more stable than NiceTry, let's open that gap up even more by removing even more bugs.

5) Whining and crying foul will only hurt us all

Re:Time to do your research

[CE@UIC]

The federal government using something overpriced and low quality...what a surprize. The last time it was rebooted was in January huh?...I guess you haven't tried to install any new software or changed any configurations. You also must be doing some pretty simple stuff with it...file serving, etc...not a development machine obviously.

Re:I still don't get it

[Skeezix]

A properly tuned and maintained NT server will be very fast and pretty darn stable too. It won't approach the stability of Linux, perhaps, but it will function a whole lot better than many Linux advocates will suggest.
------------------------------------------------ ----
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/

Re:Gotta start winning these.. this way:

[Helge Hafting]

Microsoft would never have pushed for these tests if they weren't 100% sure they would win.

They are possibly doing their own tests with linux in order to find scenarios where they can win. Then they announce a test, possibly inviting linux people to tweak the linux machine in order to gain credibility. Then they can say "They worked hard at it - but we still won!"

This isn't all bad, as we get hints on what we should improve. But we should set up tests ourself too, balancing the opinion by showing off some real-life scenarios where linux wins already.

How about a stability test with a machine that runs many different services (file/print + database + dynamic web + ...) for months? Or performance tests in an area where linux wins today?

People who want a purely static webserver now knows to use solaris or NT. Some other benchmarks might let them know when to use linux too. Red hat & other linux vendors could surely fund some tests themselves.

Re:Frivolous post . . . yada yada yada.

[Quickening]

loser. After having put up with FreeBSD for 2 years and observing how second-rate it was in functionality, performance, and stability to linux, I was glad to replace it. The few recent comparison benchmarks I have seen confirm that, and regarding your signature, no, linux has many ports than netbsd!

Re:Frivolous post . . . yada yada yada.

[Quickening]

many _more_ ports than netbsd...

Even your web server is offline!

Re:Distribution is irrelevant

[Quickening]

Absolutely! They can't possibly compare the monolithic NT against an almost infinitely configurable system. "Oh, ip stack wasn't MT? Just replace a few library calls and recompile with the best MT library" (RH's patch already available!). Or egcs, or pgcc, or other commercial compilers already available. Recompile a minimal kernel, turn off extraneous processes, pin files and executables in memory...

Re:NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[Quickening]

well, guy, it's not that we are blind to M$'s good products. For most of us, we have had to _endure_ these second-rate, poorly designed excuses for "productivity" software until we found the superior solutions available in the open-source world. You obviously have no idea what "scripting" in unix is about if you think VBscript even qualifies.

Re:Re:DUHHH!

[Quickening]

yes, supposed to be intelligent... Financial benefits? I have no doubt that I earn almost twice as much as a consulting unix sys admin than a microserf does. Microsoft is NOT the dominant player. It has a monopoly in the PC niche, but that's all. Unfortunately, it's unearned wealth gives it inordinate influence over the media and PHB's. Our energies are devoted to supporting what we perceive thru our experience to be a significantly better way of doing things.
P.S. No I haven't used ASP's; I suppose they could be one of the few exceptions to the rule that all microsoft stuff is goofy, bug-ridden, toys.

Re:Gotta start winning these.. c'mon, coders

[richnut]

Of course MS is going to win these things. I'm sure they have a team of coders who concentrate specifically on making NT perform well in benchmarks.

What people are failing to note is that NT costs hundreds of dollars a seat, where Linux is free, as in free beer. A global Linux infrastructure for a corporation costs $0. Of course professional support is much more than free, but the fact that the code is so accessible means that an organization can have it's own on-site support staff with access to every bit of information they would need to fix the problem. There's a lot of money to be saved in using Linux and people will figure it out. When they do NT's going to have a tough time.

-Rich

Re: 'Low-End' Machine.

[fuerstma]

Now, what corporation would use a loaf machine like yours to do corporate web serving and/or file sharing? If you are reaching this far in order to refute the truth, why don't you mention that NT won't load on that PS/1 you have sitting in your corner... or on that 8088 with dual bad-ass 5 and a quarters?


OTOH, it is feasable for a startup or smaller corporation to be using a Single CPU Pent III with a measily 256 MB of RAM.

Distribution is irrelevant

[crow]

Who cares what distribution they used? What matters is the versions of the kernel and servers. Since they had people from Red Hat there to tune the system, it made sense to use the distribution that they felt most comfortable with.

Distributions only matter in performance if you're not going to take the time to update and configure your software, or if you're not going to disable irrelevant services only provided by some distributions.

Arguing over distributions for benchmarks is like arguing over Gnome vs. KDE when you're not running X.

Linux performance analysis

[crow]

http://www.kegel.com/mindcraft_redux.html

(Found at LWN.) This page is full of technical analysis of the Linux kernel and Apache, explaining a number of performance problems that the benchmarks brought to light, as well as solutions for many of them.

It sounds like a repeat test in another month or two would bring things even closer. With khttpd, we might even win.

NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[mw]

One of the most important points why more and more companies choose Linux/Apache
has nothing to do with speed or price of the OS or the webserver. The really
expensive part when running webservices are administrative costs. NT & IIS may win here
for *very* small sites, and UNIX wins when it comes to housing more than a few dozen
sites - enough to make NT and especially IIS unmanageable.

* NT has no useful scripting, Linux has everything you can ever need

* you cannot remote administer NT (Im not talking about fast connections here,
(where you could use VNC), try to administer NT over a modem line. Good luck)

* once youve made your decision to use IIS, youre completly stuck when it comes
to changing to another type of webserver, or sometimes even when you want to
transfer sites from on IIS to another. Microsoft has a tool to do that job, but -
guess what - it crashes on even the smallest problems. Apaches configuration
files can easily converted to another text-based config - use sed, awk or whatever
youre use experienced with.

* if something goes wrong with IIS, the event log will contain such useful error
messages "could not bind instance XXX. The data is the error code. 43 00 00 6c".

* IIS is a hell when it comes to logging. All logging is done asynchronously, so your
only chance to see whats going on is to wait a few minutes for IIS to sync() the
logs. Really a pain when you want to study the logs...

* Sometimes under NT, the MMC console simply is stuck. Then your only chance to
get it running again is to restart the system, simply logging in as a different
user does not help. Very annoying.

* Any finally, those beloved situations where those windows popup:
"Your system is running low on virtual memory...". When you check the taskmanager,
it will show you that neither applications nor the system itself seems to use
that much memory. Again, your only chance is to restart the system.

Re:NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[Rombuu]

FUD, FUD, FUD....

NT has no useful scripting, Linux has everything you can ever need

Windows scripting host will let you do almost anything using either VBScript or Javascript. There is also Perl for Win32.

you cannot remote administer NT (Im not talking about fast connections here,
(where you could use VNC), try to administer NT over a modem line. Good luck)

I've used both PC-Duo and Carbon Copy to do remote NT administration just fine over a 28.8 line.

once youve made your decision to use IIS, youre completly stuck when it comes
to changing to another type of webserver, or sometimes even when you want to
transfer sites from on IIS to another

I've never had any problem with that... the MS tool works well, and its not like on a Linux box you can move seamlessly from Apache to Zeus, for instance.

Anyway, I'm tired of responding to your lie-filled article already. I'm sure you are just some 3133t 15 year old who doesn't know anything about system administration anyway.

Re:NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[blowdart]

* NT has no useful scripting, Linux has everything you can ever need

Then how come I'm using JScript to automate administrative tasks? The Windows Scripting Host allows any ECMA compatable language (VBSCript, JScript (Mozilla still hasn't come up to that standard) and PerlScript from ActiveState are the ones I know off. I've heard rumours of a Rexx plugin too).

* you cannot remote administer NT (Im not talking about fast connections here, (where you could use VNC), try to administer NT over a modem line. Good luck)

Hmm well I develop at home at the weekends and can RAS in and do everything I want, except remote reboots. Stop/Start services, reconfigure the web parameters and so on.

I'll agree on site configuration *grin* But then again once you know the registry, it's easy enough. And thats simple to pick up.

if something goes wrong with IIS, the event log will contain such useful error messages "could not bind instance XXX. The data is the error code. 43 00 00 6c".

The logging entries are defined by the programmers, thats not a fault of NT but the application designers.

Sometimes under NT, the MMC console simply is stuck. Then your only chance to get it running again is to restart the system, simply logging in as a different user does not help. Very annoying.

When that happens to me Task Manager is always able to kill the task.

Barry

Re:NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[mpe]

IIS is a hell when it comes to logging. All
logging is done asynchronously,

This will assist in making it faster than Apache.
With the downside that it can make logging an
utter waste of time. (Let alone issues of what
is and isn't getting logged.)

Re:NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[pudge_1]

I will only respond to the first. VBscript in ASP is by far more powerful, better laid out, and useful than any scripting language supported under linux. Maybe if you looked into what you were talking about, you would be better received making such an obnoxious, unfounded comment. The rest is opinion stated in a way to be supported by fact. If this person knew what he was talking about, and administered both unix and NT web-servers daily, I wonder if he would be so biased to either. The truth is, they both have many great features and weaknesses. The problem is, that so many people posting here are so closed to MS having something that is a good product that they rarely get past the MS logo on a package.

Re:NT smoked Linux - who cares...

[pudge_1]

and you obviously don't work with active server pages.

Annother wonderful quality test

[Felinoid]

Thies tests remind me of when PCs and Macs were being tested. The tester determined who would win. If it was a Mac mag the Mac would win if it was a PC mag the PC won. It's protecting ones investment in a platform. Microsoft (The evil empire) dosn't have to approve in the slightest. I suspect that even if Bill Gates himself sent them nasty letters they'd keep doing this sort of FUD.

The way it's done is easy. You criple it in some major way that the public isn't going to notice.

In the Mac vs PC tests it was done by pulling/disabling processor cache. It can also be done by disabling features in the Linux kernel (not hard..) or enabling features that might interfear with the preformence.

An easy way to beat out NT is do pritty much the same thing to NT and optomise Linux. Same results.

I say let the FUD fly. This fud is aimmed at the techno savy. Like telling a car expert a KIA is better than a Lamborgini and proving it by putting a lawnmower engen in the Lamborgini. It sounds desprate. Would you believe someone who regularly make false clames?

Ok it's a matter of catching in the act.. consider them cought.

A reminder to my fellow zellots... DO NOT FLAME ANYONE... and DO NOT send e-mail to people who issue FUD. Leave them ALONE.

Those that need to know, know better...
and if they can't tell the diffrence between fact and FUD then we are better off with them running NT becouse a bad admin will crash a system faster than anything and that makes what ever os they are running look bad.

I wonder

[Felinoid]

It shouldn't be to long before someone fixes the bottleneck. I doupt thats the real reason however.
Why? All the FUD, the history of thies tests and the general addatude of people who want Windows NT to be thought of as suppereor to Linux.

Microsoft has there own Zellots and some of them are in the PR department.

Linux is a good Os and so is Windows NT.
It's just not good for the same reasons

Re:Why Linux really lost.

[Felinoid]

> 1.They cheated.

I have come to expect that ANY such benchmark where someone comes out better than someone else someone cheated.

In a realistic test NT and Linux should come out equal.
Back during the Mac vs PC debates PC and Mac mags would do benchmarks a lot and the winner depended on who ran the test. A lot of the ones I saw the losing computers cache was disabled resulting in a major test bies.

I can't see anyone doing a benchmark with out first having a stake in the results.

Re:Gotta start winning these.. c'mon, coders

[Felinoid]

It's way to easy to fudge benchmarks.
They seem to rely on defects in Linux. It is a good idea to fix the defects but don't expect that to improve our scores.

Anyway speed isn't going to keep you on-line. Reliability is.
Anyone want to do a reliability bechmark?

Re:Gotta start winning these.. c'mon, coders

[Felinoid]

I don't buy the "expert" and "cost of retrainning" arguments.
Un*x experts have been around for a long time.

The money you save in not trainning NT admin and not testing NT servers dosn't cover the losses caused by untrainned NT admin and badly configured NT servers.

The time and effort put into Linux is the secret behind reliable Linux servers.

The free beer argument holds up much better...
Some times free beer is a bad thing...

In the end it's what works best for you...
It was true a long time ago and it's true today...

Re:Gotta start winning these.. c'mon, coders

[kijiki]

NT is faster than Linux in this benchmark. It is far from real-world. In the real-world, Linux has proven itself to be faster than NT, repeatedly for many people. I suspect it was the 4 NIC cards that gave NT the advantage. In the real world, a) you would not be serving static web pages over 100Mbit ethernet, and b) you would be using 4 uniprocessor linux boxes, which would be much faster, much much cheaper, and more reliable than one big monolithic machine. Its funny that MS chooses to use a monster machine instead of a cluster of small ones, which is what they advocate when comparing NT to Solaris. This just shows that MS will pay for benchmarks that NT will win, no matter how contrived they are. MS wins by marketing to managers, who know nothing about servers, and believe this "real-world" benchmark. Techies everywhere got a good laugh from it.

I'm surprised you guys missed it

[Tuross]

Facts:

* One condition of the re-test was that the Linux system could not use patches available after some date back in April before the first test. Therefore it could not use the patches that fix the TCP/IP bottleneck that are already in the 2.3 kernels. Microsoft, however, were allowed to use patches they made to NT after, such as the NTFS fixes.

* They still use Apache even though everyone knows Zeus is faster. They make a claim that it was "not much different" but there is no data given to back this up. Even Apache Group ppl will tell you that Zeus is much faster, since Apache is designed for flexibility and not raw speed.

* On that subject, the IIS server used has a fast path to spit out static pages. Apache does not.

So pretty much we have the same situation as the first test - highly tuned NT beats poorly tuned Linux. Except this time, as many people feared, the results have some kind of "stamp of approval" on it since Redhat were involved. Even if it was some guy nobody has ever heard of before (which, judging from past experience with Redhat, generally means some college kid on summer vacation). I can see the headlines now: "College Kid can't tune Linux as well as professional NT engineers from Microsoft can tune NT"

Oh, hang on, that would require truth in journalism.

So watch out for Windows 2001?

[cpeterso]

I think you're right. Microsoft can rapidly improve.. when they're scared. With Linux nipping at NT's heels, watch for Microsoft to attach Linux head on, without actually admitting it. Throughout all these Mindcraft and PC Week benchmarks, Microsoft has been particularly quiet. I don't think they even want to admit Linux exists. They'll let their henchmen do that.

Windows 2000 is so bloated and overdue, I doubt Microsoft can change it much to address Linux's "thin server" attack. So watch out for Windows 2001. Displeased with Windows 2000 looong schedule, Microsoft has said they want the next NT dev cycle to be much shorter. (This sounds a lot like Linus' wanting Linux 2.4's dev cycle to be a lot shorter than the 2.5 years spent on Linux 2.2) I bet Windows 2001 will ship 1.5 years after Windows 2000. I'm sure it will be a (somewhat) thinner beast, ready to pounce. The next few years of Linux should be very exciting.

Re:So watch out for Windows 2001?

[TPx]

Uhm... Win2000 is not really bloated, if for bloat you mean slow. It runs well and stable.

As for Windows 2001, are you referring to Neptune or the successor of Win2000? They're on different codebases...

-TPx

I thought FreeBSD SMP was supposed to suck.

[cpeterso]

Admittedly, I have not used FreeBSD or Linux SMP, but I have read about both operating systems. Doesn't FreeBSD use a single big lock for the entire kernel ala Linux 2.0? Linux 2.2 has kernel threads and finer lock granularity. Does FreeBSD have kernel threads, too? I heard someone paraphrase this as: "Solaris kernel threading is 2-3 years ahead of Linux and Linux is 2-3 years ahead of FreeBSD".

Does anyone here have first hand experience using SMP on FreeBSD and Linux? Any problems or preferences?

By Windows 2001, I meant NT 5.1/6.0/whatever

[cpeterso]

By bloated, I didn't mean slow. I just meant that for a "lean and mean" server OS, it sure includes a lot of extra packages, like IE5 or Windows Media Player or Pinball or 3D mouse pointer shadows. I don't think this stuff is going away, but I think Microsoft needs to address this issue if NT is going to be "enterprise ready".

Re:By Windows 2001, I meant NT 5.1/6.0/whatever

[Mr Bill]

Have you ever checked to see how much room IE 5.0 actually takes up? At the University where I worked, they were asked to install IE 5.0. They use a 'restore image' that allows them to format a drive and just copy over a complete install in a couple of minutes. It turned out that adding IE 5.0 increased the 'restore image' by 70 Megs. This is not 70 megs worth of files that replace old files, this is an extra 70 Megs... When you need to restore 300 PC on a weekly basis (student computer labs), this is a significant amount.
Now I don't really care how quick it is, or the fact that I have 4 Gigs of HD space, web browser (or any program for that matter) should not require that much space.

Tell me that isn't bloated software...

Re:By Windows 2001, I meant NT 5.1/6.0/whatever

[TummyX]

Most people need a web browser that works (unlike netscape), and explorer also is used to browse your local hard drives etc, basically they have replaced Windows Explorer - the shell to windows with Internet Explorer...not much increase in bloat.
Windows Media Player, well most Linux users prolly miss being able to play videos with good quality.
Pinball, well, yes. You can uninstall it tho.
3D mouse pointer, you can turn that off too.
In the enterprise, these features will take up a mnimal amount of space compared to the other needs.
Hell, enterprises are using Java, so I guess they don't care about speed or bloat.

Biased Slashdotters would just target the NT host

[cpeterso]

Do you think that many people reading /. would really hammer on the Linux server? They would try to crash the NT server. Of course, if they ignore the Linux server, it's throughput measurements would be lower.

You're talking about workstations, not servers.

[cpeterso]

People won't miss playing videos on their servers. Also, IE5 does not replace Windows Explorer. Otherwise, Windows 2000 would not ship both EXPLORER.EXE and IEXPLORE.EXE.

Re:C't did their own benchmarks (excellent work!)

[Zoinks]

This article is fabulous! These guys get an A+ in my book for objectivity and for being informative. They basically tell the reader every little thing they did and what the effects were, regardless of who's ox was gored. What's wrong with the American rags that they can't be as technically complete as C't? Too many hidden agendas? Too worried about whether they're violating someone's NDA?

C'T magazine did their own tests...

[kieran]

... and Linux came out marginally on top. Conditions were a good bit more real-world, and the article is pretty well-written. Read it in English at http://www.heise.de/ct/english//99/13/ 186-1/

(Info found at http://www.lwn.net/daily/)

Re: ext2fs (was: .. filesystem usage in tests!..)

[mjg]

Have you got some proof in the form of unbiased figures to back up these claims about *BSD?

If so, please post them (or a link to them), since I'm very curious about this...

Linux is making NT better

[Mr Bill]

If there is one thing that Microsoft has done well in the past, is that it has adapted quickly to threats. It looks like they are again changing their ways, this time to combat their demize at the hands of OSS and FS.

The big difference this time, is the fact that they realize that they can't win with marketing alone... They can only win by improving their own product.

In my opinion, this is a welcome change. It show that competition in an open market will eventually provide better products.

Who knows, perhaps we will one day see an OS from Microsoft that is free and open (not likely, but not entirely out of the question)

For now however, I will keep using Linux for my own use because it fills my requirements (not because I think its the best of the lot, that is inconsequential)

Re:Linux is making NT better

[styopa]

Very true, MS is very capable of improving their product in order to stay alive. A really good example of this is the MS vs Borland battles. I have been working with WordPerfect since the days that Borland coupled it with Quattro Pro. This combination caused MS to improve Word and Excel very rapidly in order to compete with Borland. Although I still think WordPerfect is a far superior word processor than Word, I do have to conceed that Excel is infact a better spreadsheet than Quattro Pro at this time, but I still use Quattro Pro.

Over the past couple of years there hasn't been much of a threat to MS and so they have really let their OS and several of their other products to become very very bloated and sloppy because they haven't needed to drastically improve them in order to mantain a strangle hold on the market. Linux has shown, is showing, and will continue to show itself to be a very imposing threat to MS. They aren't going to sit on their behinds and watch us pass them by without a battle.

NT will improve, quickly. To be ignorant of MS's ability to improve a product with the amount of resources that they have would be a mistake.

Shall we overcome? I am going to say yes, in time. Will future battle be easy? Definately not. MS is preparing for war and considering what has happened to Borland, err Inprise, and OS/2 that should not be taken lightly.

Re:Linux is making NT better

[mohaine]

Have you tried Win2000 Beta 3?


Once you have, you will know how wrong you are.
Being forced to work on NT at work(at least for my workstation) I fear for the future. If anything, it is MUCH worse then NT 4.

I'm just waiting for VisualCafe for linux.

What these benchmarks really SAY

[GeneralTao]

There's an interesting article I read off LinuxToday which analyses the results of this benchmark.
NT smoked us.. but unless bandwidth gets a whole lot cheaper REAL fast, no one will care!

check it out:
http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/mstest.html

Great Link, Please read preceding link

[javac]

see subject

Re:They F*&^# up again

[Genius]

I am sorry, but I humbly disagree. IMHO, they got it right this time, by testing the most optimized HTTP server on each platform: APACHE for Linux and IIS for NT. That works great for me, since one would most likely not use APACHE on NT due to the lack of optomization vs the linux version. Just my 1c.

Why Linux really lost.

[iapetus]

1. They cheated.
   
2. It's not fair to use more than one processor.
   
3. A zero got missed off the end of the Linux performance results.
   
4. NT only outperforms Linux in non-real-world situations, like when both machines are turned on.
   
5. It doesn't matter that NT was faster, because Linux is the right speed. Anything that goes faster is just dangerous.
   
6. Once you reach a certain threshold (almost exactly where you get faster than Linux, in fact) reliability becomes more important.
   
7. They used NT 4.0, and we only used Linux 2.2, so all the Linux scores should be doubled to make up for the version advantage.
   
8. NT smells funny.
   
9. Who cares about benchmarks anyway?
   

Re:Why Linux really lost.

[Oxryly]

you forgot:

10. Anyone who would spend over $6000 on server hardware would certainly get stingy and not want to pay one cent more for the OS.
11. Multiple net cards? Urban myth! Never happens!
12. I have a 386 here with 2 mb RAM that runs a gopher server with excellent performance! They're test obviously wasn't based in reality!
13. All network administrators are competent kernel hackers, therefore the source code to the OS is invaluable in any business setting.
14. You can't benchmark the spirit of Linux! Its faith man, you just gotta believe!

etc etc

Oxryly

Re:Why Linux really lost.

[TummyX]

Um, it's pretty obvious Linux did lose, and would lose anyway. Redhat were there to oversea and do any tweaking they like (after all, they have the source no?).
Linux failed cause of it's lack of a multithreaded ip stack and immature SMP support.

Wrong way of testing.

[loff]

Give a faremer, and a city boy a fast car each. Tell them to go home and se who can drive fastest.
The farmer has a wery bad road, and cant use the car home.
The city boy has the highway to drive on.
You chold give two different companies the same amount of money
Then they shold set up the fastest server. One company
with NT the other with Linux. One of the companies
have to pay some $$$$$$ for the licence, and the other
company can by a huge cluster. Then test mail, web, dns and all the stuff.
Then the system cold be tested for 5000 users. That will be a huge lisence fee to pai for.

Absolutely right!

[Argyle]

The power of the Linux community is the ability to mobilize and focus on problems in a way a traditional company can't.

These results will simply focus the Linux development effort to remove these issues.

If anything, Microsoft should be running scared of the next compairison. The Linux coders were just shown the plan on how to beat NT in the next round. All the Redmond folk can do is hope to stay ahead.

not if you have more then one CPU

[delmoi]

While what you say might be true for a single CPU, it certanly isn't the case when you have more then one, if you only have one thread, that means that only one of your CPUs can work on your program at a time, and in this case, only One of the 4 CPUs was running Linux's IP code, with the rest going to waist...
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

Re:M$ Biased reporting. Follow the money!

[kkreamer]

Actually, Linux has been around for 8 or 9 (not counting the fact that it is based off of Unix, which is much older).

It's finally nice to see ....

[opencode]

.... that the press is interpreting benchmarks as what they really are: a process implemented to improve results. In other words: OK, the benchmark has been done, and now the Linux community knows what needs to be done. I applaud the press for this interpretation, instead of something along the lines of, "looks like the Linux Community is 'pulling a Microsoft' by burying the results in a dainty little PR statement, and not actually addressing the issues..."

Now if only the Linux Community can learn to implement this interpretation of benchmarks ....

That is to say: folks, benchmarks are our friends, EVEN IF they're biased !! So what if the NT box uses an Apache server ... I'd like to see WINE use IIS, just to say that we've tried it -- wouldn't THAT be a hoot !!

Lost? Hey guys.. we won!

[Pengo]

Don't you see what is going on here..

We didn't loose anything.. We have now a (How many billion dollar company?) trying to protect their reputation. Microsoft is on their heels and if they think this will stop the community and tarnish our reputation.. wrong. The fact of the matter is Linux is a much more managable system than Windows from the code standpoint. How much resources are they putting into these benchmarks to keep beating us.

Obviously we are the under-dog, it might take 2 years before we can beat them in a benchmark... but who cares. The world *loves* an under-dog, and we are here to stay.

They are not going to crush us with a benchmark, they are going to crush themselves with the great publicity we are getting.

Any fool can look at the benchmarks and see that in reality, even if Linux isn't serving as fast as NT (According to the benchmark results...) Hey, it's fast enough. Everyone knows that the system is VERY stable, and also ... FREE! (Free Beer!) :)

Oh boy... Soapbox alert.

[Pengo]

PAHLEASE!

Geez dude, get off your soap box. My lord..

So what if Rob takes money from Microsoft, I would too if I could. I appreciate the time that Rob has put into this site ..

If Microsoft wants to sponser /., hey.. more power to them.. more power to rob.

(I am having a flashback of the reactions when winamp was bought out by AOL...) More power to the sap. They are doing a hell of a lot better than I am.


In reality, I can make a choice.. I can choose Windows or Linux.

Doesn't matter who is sponsering who.. who is using what. I don't care if linux never becomes more popular.. I just love the thrill of running on a new operating system. The day it becomes ultra popular/defacto OS.. I am sure that something new and innovative will come out to replace it. That is the great Circle of Life! :)

They Fucked up again

[Uart]

in a proper scientific experiment, there is only one variable, in this case it was (read should have been) the operating system. However, they also added the additional variable of IIS. They should have used Apache on both, then it would have been a proper comparison...

Perspective

[Wah]

for those of us with mice
http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/mstest.ht ml


Gotta love numbers. I think this puts more a real world spin on the whole thing.

To paraphrase metaphorically....

My New Tech car goes 5000 MPH.
Oh yea, my Free Open car goes 2000 MPH.

But the speed limit is 55.

Yea, but who obeys the speed limit.

O.k, but the ROAD breaks down at about 500 MPH, so where does your car go after that?

And BTW, how often does your car break down? How much did it cost?

..and the final sentence:
I thought everyone flew planes in the real world?

I have a T3 line you can use!

[DonkPunch]

Oh, you wanted one that was actually connected to something? :)

Slashdot benchmark

[D3]

I propose a new benchmark based on the /. effect. I'm sure someone else has already said this but I just thought of it and can't recall having seen anyone else post the idea.

We get M$ and RedHat and anyone else to set up servers with the same content on a known, solid T3 connection for each box. Then we post the URLs to slashdot and see which box can handle the load. According to ZD's numbers the machines should blow. There are enough people on /. to generate over 5,000 hits/second aren't there?

BTW, anyone have a T3 we can borrow? ;)

Re:Slashdot benchmark

[dguinan]

Easy enough - the link needs to point to a frame page on /. The frame page loads one frame from linux, one page from NT. Each page should dynamically generate current statistics using whatever is the most dynamic mechanism (e.g. ASP for NT, ...) for each O/S.

-Dan

Actually, That's Linux => 1, Mindcraft => 0

[Clark Kent]

Here's what the second benchmark showed:

1. The Linux Advocates Were Right

Mindcraft *did* seriously mis-configure Linux in the first test.

The Linux/Apache peak performance in the second test was approximately 50% higher than in the first test.

More important, the disasterous collapse of Linux/Apache at higher loads, that occurred in MindCraft's first test, was nowhere to be seen in the second test - Linux/Apache performance remained high as the load increased. The performance drop-off in the first test was caused by MindCraft's mis-configuration.

2. The Anti-Linux Zealots Were Wrong

Linux advocates did *not* oppose the first test simply because NT beat Linux. The opposition was based on valid concerns about how the test was run - concerns that have been born out by the second test.

There is little serious opposition to the second test, which is generally considered fair (within the limits of the benchmark). In fact, the knowledge gained from the second test has been welcomed by the Linux community, who look forward to the performance gains that will result.

3. NT/IIS Beat Linux/Apache - Not That It Matters

IIS on NT *did* achieve a higher benchmark result than Apache (or Samba) on Linux. But, as many have pointed out, the conditions of the benchmark are highly artificial. In the real world, where there is a greater mix of activity on the server, Linux's virtues in the areas of stability, task management, and I/O performance would play a greater role.

As some have pointed out, when you're shopping for a reliable delivery van, the fact that it can be beat by a dragster is of little consequence. Or, to use another car analogy, by pouring on the nitrous, you can beat any other car on the track - for one lap (before burning out your engine).

4. Linux/Apache Performance Was Excellent - Not That It Matters

As others have pointed out, the Linux/Apache performance on one CPU was enough to handle the load of *twenty* T1 lines. But again, the test is too artificial for that to have much meaning.

5. That MindCraft Guy is a Whiner

There are always jerks on every side of every issue. For him to pick out the most obnoxious things said by some Linux supporters, and suggest that they mean something, is childish. Those mouth-offs don't represent the Linux community, anymore than Ballmer represents the...NT...oh...wait... :^)

Re:Biased Slashdotters would just target the NT ho

[blowdart]

Yea but it's not difficult to find out what web server is running by telnetting to port 80.

Re:FOUL? Maybe not

[PhoneMonkey]

What if the tests are right?

All it means is we have fodder for the next revision.

cost of NT

[neils]

I'm sure that NT doesn't run as long as linux would, and you've got to count in the fact that a 5 client NT server liscense probly costs somewhere atound $400 ... while you can do anything you'd like to linux, and use it in any manner for nothing.

SMB "Tuning"

[hey!]

They researched why their serving files via Microsoft Networking was slow, and saw that a little tweaking could take care of it more easily than a code rewrite.

Well, not exactly. If I read correctly, they split up the data being served into four different file systems so as to avoid an NTFS bottleneck. If this is true, I'd view this change as more of a kludge than a tweak.

To see the kind of boost they got on the benchmark in a real world scenario, you'd have to arrange things such that users use each partition equally. My sense is that this would be nearly impossible or at best would make you very unpopular ("Fred, too many people are using 'L:'; we need to load balance the NT server. Can your team arrange to distribute their CAD files between 'L:','M:', 'N:' and 'O:' so that they use each drive equally all the time?")

In real world scenarios, rules like the 80/20 rule, or Zipfian distributions (v/n approximately a constant, where v is volume of use and n is numerical rank by volume) are the norm. Unusual peaks in usage tend to be even more skewed. In each of these cases it is unlikely that you would see any real world improvement from the changes the MS people made for the test.

Of course I only read the summary of the changes; maybe somebody more familiar with the mechanics of the actual test could set me straight if I'm wrong?

In any case, I'm delighted that Linux did so well against NT, even if it didn't come up on top. Given the artificiality of the test, there is considerable uncertainty in how to interpret the result. Given this admitted slop, it looks to me like Linux performance is in the ballpark on NT's home turf (not to mention a great way to make good use of surplus 486s you'd never run NT on). If we get a better, multithreaded IP stack out of this to boot, great, but I wouldn't sacrifice stability and security just to be able to catch up on a benchmark machine with 4 NICs.

Re:SMB "Tuning"

[hey!]

200% slower? That's HORRIFIC to put it mildly

I think you mean 50% slower; alternatively, NT posted 100% faster. Don't feel too bad -- it's an easy trap to fall into.

In any case, I think you are misreading the numbers.

The benchmark does NOT say that Linux is 50% slower. It says that Linux peak throughput is 50% of NT's on this particular hardware. Most of the time users will experience similar performance on both platforms.

What this number tells you is the statistical confidence level you can set when planning for total throughput needs. In other words you can posit some particular scenario in which NT may operate poorly 0.5% of the timeslices and in the same scenario (on the same hardware) Linux would fail 1%.

I'm not minimizing the importance of this, but you do have to take it into the full range of failure scenarios in planning your installation.

Your point about the level of indirection offered by shares is well taken, but I don't think it negates my point, because I disagree with your assumption that you can effetively load balance file service by manually shifting entire departments between volumes.

While it's true that you'll never see 100% of your traffic in one department when you look at things in long term aggregate, it is irrelevant to the metric being disussed (peak throughput). I'd venture to say that in most cases of unusually heavy use, there's going to be a high locality of reference when you take a moderate length timeslice (a few minutes or less), no matter how you divide things up. Demand tends to respond to external, Poisson distributed events (delivery deadlines, month end, timesheets due, star wars trailer downloaded and admin hasn't found out yet).

Furthermore, we don't need to set the bar at 100% to undermine this "tuning" practice; 80%, or even grouping files into three sets with respectively 60%, 20% and 20% will make this tweak ineffective. To work, I believe it requires an unnaturally uniform access across the four file systems that in reality will only happen under conditions of very low load or in artificially constructed workloads (i.e. benchmarks).

I don't think your point about DFS applies (at least if it applies to the NT facility that I think it does). Aside from the fact I don't remember seeing that it was used on the benchmark, I believe it would reproduce the bottleneck the tweak was meant to avoid. If it didn't, locality of reference would defeat it. Either way, this bottleneck is a bottleneck.

So, you put together the somewhat contrived way the Windows system was "tuned", the peculiarities of the test bed (e.g. the four NIC issue), I don't find these results so shocking or disparate. Indeed, the take home message on this one is that Linux is in striking distance of NT on its home turf; the developers, if they wish to, know exactly where to concentrate their efforts to bridge the gap.

I expect that NT will probably get a fix to NTFS pretty soon that makes these number more acheivable in practice, and Linux will get a fix that gooses up its heavy load IP performance with multiple NICs, and we'll slug it out again. As a Linux fan who uses NT at work, this make me doubly happy, because both products will get better. This current round may or may not be a Pyrrhic victory for Microsoft, but its sure going to be good for us.

Already responded last week, but oh well...(Import

[CroxWire]

This time I will say what was learned from the so called second round of benchmarks: 1) It showed that Mindcraft didn't know what they were doing. 2) It shows that we need improvements, and it was very helpful in stating these facts. I love Linux, but I won't turn away from its problems, because if I or any of you do, we are sentencing Linux to be a second rate Operating System, when it really doesn't belong in that category. Its great to see people talking so great of the operating system you have accepted as the operating system that has almost everything. But I know that it hurts when you see it being put down in the wrong light, but the thing one has to realize is that some things are true and some things are lies, and you have to be able to know tell which is which, so if you know how to program, pick up the source code is a check it out, if you find a better way to do something make the changes, change it and see if it puts out the proformance you want, and send it to Linus, or who ever is incharge of that peace of code. Thats all I have to say. Oh yeah Debian Rocks!!! hahaha

append="mem=256M"

[SwissPope]

Did the benchmarkers remember to add append="mem256M" to their lilo.conf? I know it sounds silly, but sometimes it horrifies me how many servers are running with only 64M of memory because configuring more memory isn't so obvious.

Or is 64M no longer the default upper limit of memory in the 2.2 kernels?

It baffles me that you'd have to go the extra step to add that line to detect extra memory in the first place. Can anyone provide an explanation?

Interesting spread of comments

[eof]

This is a really interesting spread of comments on this matter. We have on the one hand the Linux advocates (which I will happily count myself a member of). Opposite us are the NT advocates. Both groups make good (and bad) points, reflecting a range of reasons from excellent and well-spoken, to extremely close-minded. In short, it doesn't matter _why_ NT beat Linux so much as what it means to have this kind of attention. Yes, the hardware was more conducive to NT than Linux. Is this unfair to Linux? Nope. Does it mean that NT is better than Linux? Nope. It only means that NT outperforms Linux within the limited parameters of the test. Additionally, some limitations within Linux were uncovered that can be improved on. This is excellent news! All of this states quite firmly (to those who choose to look at the big picture instead of a few numbers, however captivating) that Linux and NT can be seen on a comparable scale. Not bad for an OS that scales well on a 386 or higher. Keep in mind just how flexible Linux can be, as well as how committed its development and support is. It's never shameful to be beaten in a contest. It's only shameful to refuse to improve yourself for the next contest. Peace.

--

200% slower???

[BaB]

ups,
this would really be horrible!
not only, that linux doesn't provide any information (100%slower) but it also sucks the other 100% from the user connecting to the side :-\

Re:This report was *Linux* biased!!!

[TurboJustin]

Sure BSD is solid and designed by real OS researchers. That's great, but how much longer has BSD been around than Linux? and how close is linux today? take that and look 5 years down the road. Becuase Linux doesn't restrict who can contribute to the kernel and countless other software that is incredibly important, you end up with much more contributors and much higher quality software. In short, the bazaar wins over the cathedral.

Re:exact same URL as "NT beats Linux: again"

[mpe]

Maybe instead people should look at
http://www.heise.de/ct/english//99/13/186-1/
Which describes a rather different set of tests.

Re:Gotta start winning these.. c'mon, coders

[mpe]

you would be using 4 uniprocessor linux boxes

Or you'd be using 5 boxes, with only one running
apache, the other 4 running squid...

'Low-End' Machine.

[NME]

Aside: I use Linux on quite a few boxes (p120, 16M) that I wouldn't dream of putting NT on, because it's such a hog. It would be nice to see something like this pointed out by these tests. -nme!

Gotta start winning these.. c'mon, coders

[drougie]

Microsoft would never have pushed for these tests if they weren't 100% sure they would win. They surely anticipated our response to sketchy testing procedures, and sure enough, we continue to lose. Yeah, yeah, this isn't a drag race, but it would be nice if we could program software that wasn't this much slower than Windows when one of the aspects of Linux we've defended is speed and stability. So, let's do it.

New posible Kernel "Future"

[ram]

O.K., It seems that this guys are challenging the OSS comunity to develop new "futures" in the shiny code of linux. thats a fact, the guys of Redmond are jelous abaout the purity of code that the linux kernel have right now and how fast this could be changed and optimized. It is true that the IP threading stuff could and NEED to be a point of view to develop and optimize in linux, but, !!! hey Linux Kernel Coders !!!, what about to implement new code in the linux sources capable of optimize the performance of the kernel to succed an special kind of Benchmark test? I dont know, may be it could be an "extra" option on the kernel configuration menus, like the processor selector, but with options to optimize the kernel to a specific benchmark test. It could be a great idea.! Because all we know allready that the linux kernel right now has been demostrated a much more greater performance IN THE REAL LIFE than NT. So, if this guys are pushing us to "DEMOSTRATE" in the Benchmarking world who is the dominant OS, maybe we could develop a kernel specificaly complided to satisfy this stuff and kick an ass again...

Sorry about my broke english...

What why who, and when?

[SlashDread]

What would multi thread ip stack add besides serving thru 2 nics at the same time? Would it help routing? firewall? Other multi nic services in general?
Who can code it and when is it finished? :)
Exchange this!#$%#

okay so our OS isnt perfect...

[g33kt0r]

but we already knew that. now we know where to make fixes. now we have a new focus. this is a good thing, because next time the tests come around, we still may not win, but we ill do better that is for sure.

after all these tests dont really mean anything, the NT machines are nothing like what they would be in the real world. they are so pimped out on MS engineered steriods that you will find machines like them no where else on Earth. but our happy little linux machines are everywhere, and they dont need a team of monkeys working around the clock to make them run.

i reccomend people reading something i read today but i cant find the link, anyways it was about how linux under the conditions in the worst mindcraft test could outperform its internet connection even if it had like 5 T1's hooked up to it. so basically even though they say NT outperforms Linux by X % it doesnt matter because the linux machine can already outperform its own connections... somebody post this url again if you know what im talking about it is good reading.

Re:okay so our OS isnt perfect...

[g33kt0r]

what do you know, it was just posted on /. well here it is anyways

http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/mstest.html

Multithreading and features of real OS'

[strat]

The one comment that /. edited out of my original post of this story is that since BeOS allocates a thread to every network socket opened, I'm really curious as to how it will play out over the longer term.

I've used so many hackjob thread packages, that finding an OS with this technology engineered in from the ground up gives me a woody.

It is clear though that a lot of people don't appreciate the value that certain OS features can bring to the party. I attribute a lot of this to ignorance or religion. Little tutorials like yours on multithreading are invaluable in correcting this. Thanks.

It's like when I first read the source code to the Linux IP stack and noticed that most of the lessons learned by BSD over 10 years weren't visible ANYWHERE. No slow start, congestion control, or even OPTION HANDLING (it was all stubs). That has changed some, and will continue, but some people require things to be right before they'll commit.

I'm as prepared to like Linux as the next guy, but I don't let one OS' features (or lack of same) define the possible universe.

Re:ZD is partly owned by MS?!?!

[zaw]

I don't know but They've been known to supporting the big advertisers.
Look at their magazines MS all over. MS banner all over all of their pages too.

Re:this is more that just config.

[Malcontent]

In the real world though this does become a problem. In a given web site some files are bound to be hit more often then other files and when you have multiple requests of the same partition you get into the same mess.

Re:Maybe there is another principal a work

[Jeff Archambeault]

Most companies can't afford to pay *nix admins. Any luser can pay $$$ and cram for the NT?? test, put in notice at their $8.00/hr cube/carpentry/lawnmowing job, and run a company's system. They deserve what they get and pay for.

As for the topic, I believe M$ knows-darn-well what Linux (and probably most every other OS and most major software packages) can and can't do, and actively exploit this info in any test it preforms against any competitors product. Open Source makes it that much easier. Bottomless pockets also help. That's what companies do to "compete".

I started out on an Apple ][ back in '79 or so. Linux brings me back to the Beagle Bros products that helped me explore more than what came shrink-wrapped. Linux calls to those who used to take things apart when they were kids (or still do) to figure out "how they worked". Alebit more fun back in the mechanical days, as VLSI and surface-mounted packages aren't that fun to look at (or pry off boards.)

Linux allows for people to really learn about computer technology at all levels without having to worry about licensing limitations, development software costs, or "The Software Police" (acronym escapes me.)

So where's the cost savings? Having technically adept and curious users that know how to explore their system to their want/need and adapt it to their own style of usage instead of expecting their OS to automagically give them what they need would help. I could get together with my friends and build a Beowulf cluster next weekend just for grins (and experience, of course) just because it can be done for exactly $0. Computer geeks do things like this as a hobby. Some get paid to do it. (sigh)

Carefully selected benchmarks == good info!

[Sun Tzu]

Because MS/MC appears to have been so careful to research the underlying problem with that particular benchmark using that specific hardware configuration, they have illuminated a core scalability weakness in Linux. The lack of a multithreaded IP stack, according to their claims, slows even Zeus down to about the same speed as Apache. I'm convinced that they went into this *very* confident that NT would win.

Does anybody else suspect that the kernel gurus are, even now, working on clean, fast multithreaded IP code?

Re:Carefully selected benchmarks == good info!

[shadrack]

As a matter of fact they are. RedHat has already posted a patch. This according to what they said at the Miami roadshow last Friday.


Also, everybody remember...

MS was just being a good Linux user and reporting bugs! (Credit Linus Torvalds for that, not me).

Re:FOUL! Unfair filesystem usage in tests!

[ElJefe]

Yeah, but Feynman is a bit difficult to get in touch with, seeing as how he's dead. However, Kip Thorne is alive and well (and working down the hall from me).

-ElJefe

This Is War...

[Dharma]

OK. Folks, reality check. When we watch a football/basketball game, do we respect the guy on the losing team who whines about how the refs were unfair, or how they were decimated by injuries or otherwise makes excuses? No. We respect the guy who says, "They beat us fair & square, but we're gonna practice like crazy and take 'em down next year!".

NT beat Linux. Big woo. Did we really expect M$ to sit back on their laurels and let Linux eat into their profits? If you did, you're living in a dream world.

Let's look at the bright side, we're now officially in the big leagues. We're getting press coverage and M$ seems to be making it a priority to discredit Linux in favor of NT. However, that also means we have a responsibility to behave as big-leaguers. That means several things:

1. As of now, M$ is the enemy. THE ENEMY. Until now we've been able to sling barbs back & forth, but no one took it really seriously. It's pretty clear now that M$ is eyeing Linux the way they've eyed other would-be competitors. Since they can't buy & shelve Linux, they must resort to their only other tactic... destroy Linux. I guarantee you this is their goal. It's absolutely vital that we understand this & do everything in our power to stop it. That means....

2. We have to come together in a much more concerted manner to make Linux the most rock-solid, high-performance OS out there. If we get beat in a test, fine. We'll redouble our efforts until Linux thrashes NT in performance tests. We *must* do this or M$ will win the ultimate war.

3. We need to be as effective at evangelizing as M$. To a large degree we have been, but now that we have the spotlight on us, it's absolutely imperative that we come across as intelligent, determined, *non-whining* & mature. The management types who see us and M$-marketing must see that we are more than a bunch a snot-nosed, pimply faced rude, crass hackers if he is going to entrust his business to us. That means we need to start putting our money where our mouth is. No more "M$ sucks, end of story", no more profanity, just cold, hard facts of how Linux is superior *as a package*.

Since I'm a coder, I'm more than willing to do my part to contribute to the performance-enhancement initiative. Other coders should do likewise. Non-coders can help too. Educate yourselves. Help with evangelization & documentation.

As trite as this sounds, part of what made Linux great is also it's biggest weakness. Linux is the product of distributed, unmanaged, collective intelligence. While that has freed us from stifling burocracy & promises made by markting types, it also makes us vulnerable. M$ has it's guns pointed at us, if we want Linux to survive, we're going to have to be a little more organized.

We all can contribute something. We just need to mobilize (and have a mobilization center).

exact same URL as "NT beats Linux: again"

[TheDeal]

we had this story, a couple days ago: here... it has the exact same url. this is the same story. doh!

Excuse me?

[detritus.]

That is Bullshit - it's not a feature, it's nothing but worn technology.
I'd like to see how the tests round up when they benchmark NT5 with FAT32.

Re:OT: 100Base-FX (fiber optics)

[mrbooze]

What about 100-VG-Anylan, or something like that.

I remember I had to remember that for the MS Networking Essentials exam, so it *MUST* be true!

Re:Age of Linux users

[NodeZero]

I am 19 and switched to linux right before my first year of college. A lot of my friends in college switched to linux because of that same reason. We have labs and labs of sparcs.

Re:this is more that just config.

[Mr. Blonde]

I think the partitioning was used to allow multiple threads to access the separate allocation tables simultaneously rather than having to deal with any of the synchronization issues associated with having just one mammoth partition. This is fairly common in NT administration.

You're not really telling the clients they can only see a subset of the data, you're just telling the web server that it has to grab it's data from four different drive letters. Though with Linux this is a transparent feature, in NT, it's just something that you have to deal with.

Microsoft learns the adaptation game (sort of)

[WolfShades]

From the PC Week article:
==========
Previously, we had found that Samba could outperform NT 4.0 using NT workstation clients (see "NOS crossroads," PC Week's Shoot-Out of network operating systems). As a direct result of that Shoot-Out, Microsoft's performance engineers were prompted to find ways to enhance file throughput from NT servers to NT workstation clients.
=========

Apparently, one of the reasons Linux hasn't been blowing NT out of the water as in previous tests is that Microsoft has figured out how to reconfigure NT to do better. I wonder if they haven't also made changes to the NT kernel or other underlying software? Of course, since we have no NT source code, we can't tell. OTOH, we *know* the Linux community is already hard at work changing its code, as is the Apache and Samba communities, and both the programs and their users will be better off in the long run. How long have people been doing Linux versus NT tests, and NT is just now catching up? How long does anyone think it will take for Linux/Apache/Samba to adapt and come back even stronger?

(Maybe Linux is more Borg-like than MS after all, but in a good way!)

Re:WE DIDN'T LOOSE, STUPID!

[Hermanetta]

Ya, multi-threaded, non-blocking IP stacks suck. No man, don't do it. Hey, that reminds me, we should make all the IO blocking so SCSI works like IDE and video works like Nintendo.

WE NEED TO TURN THIS BOAT AROUND NOW, BEFORE ITS TOO LATE!!!!

Damn Microsoft!

- Herman

Myopia

[nick43]

Linux advocates definitely suffer from extreme myopia. As soon as anyone hears anything that slightly discredits Linux, it is dismissed as Lies, M$ funded, blah, blah, blah. I use Linux all day and avoid M$ products, but I still can come clean. No one will ever be happy with these tests until Linux wins and that is weak, face the facts.

Re:FOUL! Unfair filesystem usage in tests!

[slayer_fan]

Call up Hawking? Man you've got to be kidding. He is far too over-rated. And just what are his greatest contributions to science? Nothing against him or to the Anonymous Coward that posted this, but I think it's ridiculous when people forget (or probably don't even know of) other great physicists that have made far greater contributions to science like Feynmann or Dirac than Hawking did.
Anyways, enough of that. As for NT vs. Linux goes, can anyone explain to me the relation between NT's fabulous benchmark results and it's instability (Blus Screen of Death). I only see NT be great for serving MS Office applications.

Later!!!

thats the way of the businessworld

[linuxnewbie.org]

its sad but that is how the business world acts.

they see a threat to their market share and try to strangle it and kill that threat.
hence this hype about nt being faster. too bad nt is not efficient for the administrator nor is it reliable. moreover, the need to reboot a web server for every litle thing you change or add is ridiculous--for businesses this can mean downtime and downtime=lost revenue for some e-commerce sites.

NT=downtime :)

Sensei

I still prefer Linux...

[nickelodeon]

Regardless of the minor differences in speed, I still prefer using Linux over NT any day. At least I don't have to reboot when changing the smallest sodding configuration thing. Call me old-fashioned... but I like my command line. And I think lots of people feel the same. Show me an editor as good as vi native to NT :)

All we need to do now is enhance the code slightly and beat NT. No worries :)

Maybe there is another principal a work

[JediLuke]

Uh, maybe there is the fact that you can get Linux for free, as many users as you want for free, and run lots of free program, without big brother looking over your shoulder. Anyone know what NT Server w/25 clients costs...like $3500 i think?
$3500 != free
i think not...viva linux!

Re:FOUL! Unfair filesystem usage in tests!

[Omega_X]

uhmm
I dont know.
:)
This is a Stupid coment brought you by a Expo in Ecuador ..
We were demonstrating linux capabilities.. and BOOM... I read slashdot.. and I cried..
Snif...
NT SUCKS
I luv my Little Linuxito Os

Age of Linux users

[styopa]

Here is an interesting question that really doesn't have much to do with the article but oh well.
When, as in what is the average age of the person, does someone switch over to Linux from MS?

From what I can tell there are a lot of people in the Linux community that are in college. My guess is that there is probably a disproportionate amount of Linux users to MS users in the college scene. I know that at the college that I go to, a great deal of the engineering students have gotten really ticked at MS and NT and there seems to be a very large number that are switching over to Linux.
One of the big reasons is that there are quite a few labs for upper division classes are run with SPARC stations, and with ethernet connections in the dorms students have found that it is easier to get Linux on their box. They just ssh over to the lab and work from their room. You can't get nearly seamless connection between two computers with NT, especially if the one that is the important one is running Solaris.

Re:M$ Biased reporting. Follow the money!

[Milican]

In my opinion this is a great event. Linux has not even been around for 5 years and it can compete very well with the most powerful company in the world. So it didn't beat NT this time.. well like another slashdotter said. This is simply cannon fodder for next time. And with truly talented programmers like Alan Cox I'm sure Linux will look much better next time. Big thanks to Alan, Linus, and the *countless* others who have made Linux what it is.

Re:FreeBSD w/ same problems

[sirket]

A couple things:

UFS is a lot more stable than ext2fs. It is more reliable and has fewer problems with fragmentation. Also with softupdates it is a LOT faster than ext2fs.


Secondly the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack has always been more correct and faster than the Linux TCP/IP stack. The new Linux stacks are getting better especially in the 2.2 series but they have a ways to go.


Calling the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack bad because it is old is rather stupid. Unix has gotten better with age not worse. The same applies for the file systems.


The thing to remember here is that this is not a Linux - FreeBSD war. It is not even a Linux VS Microsoft war. This is about giving people options and about making our respective OS's as fast and reliable as possible.

-Don

Re:Explanation: why linux lost

[HiH]

What bothers me a lot more is that linux also lost on the single processor box.

Does anyone have an explanation for this ?

Re:It's OK guys

[Qui-Gon]

I couldn't agree more.

Also, how come they don't run tese test for longer? 5 Days? Come on... Let the servers run for 2 or 3 weeks them run the tests...

Re:Physical changes to software

[spitwidth]

amen, like duh.

Re:LIARS!

[gfhandel]

I agree... he who makes the dough, makes the rules. We all know Linux kicks a...!! unfortunately Bill Gates has the money, the power and the whole IT industry by the Adam's apple. To me Linux rules, whatever MS says, who cares.. we are not getting a single DIME out of Gates fortune. Besides ALL monopolies crumble at any point in time.. Who ever though PAN-AM or EASTERN would go under.. treat people like dummies and u are bound to fail miserably.

Linux geeks humbled

[pudge_1]

I hope some of you linux geeks are at least slightly humbled by this (I'm sure) unexpected article. I read the posts when the first test was run and 99% of the posts (I think) were saying that had the tests been run properly, Linux would have beaten MS hands down. Not true. Oh, but there were thread problems, blah..blah..blah.... Linux is great, I use it too, but I'm not so stuck on it that I can't find it's weaknesses, or MS's strengths. So what if Bill Gates is a Pig. That holds no real meaning when your company is choosing a product. And if thread-handling or whatever needs to be fixed before a linux webserver can beat an MS webserver, then, MS was ready for the test and linux wasn't. This seems to be the case up to this point. I wish that linux users could put the energy that they use to complain to better use, like fixing bugs.

Re:DUHHH!

[pudge_1]

Had I realized that all of you linux-only users wanted to be around only like minds, I wouldn't have bothered posting here. I thought these were supposed to be intelligent debates with point-by-point discussions. Either this person has something great to say, but doesn't bother because he thinks he too far above me to stoop to my level, or he is the kid, and insults people who disagree with him because that's just what he knows. I won't bother relating to you the financial benefits that Microsoft has brought to those of us who make a living with computers....Do you think that Apple would have brought the same? I won't bother trying to compare salaries. Microsoft-skilled jobs are everywhere. I won't bother because Microsoft is the dominant player and it seems that you linux people are content to sit here by yourselves...talking to yourselves....while very few seem to be listening. I like linux. I hope it develops a real market share. I think thats great for the other OS's. If it does though, I'm sure that you adamant linux supporters will be left behind looking for something else to throw all of your energy into. Because as sure as Microsoft became a corporate behemoth, if linux goes that way, don't think that the controlling party will be so nice. Oh... but red hat is more loving than microsoft....isn't it.

Re:M$ Biased reporting?? What about Red Hat?

[Beau Zeau]

PC Week says that "After a tortuous five days of tests, audited by the best and the brightest from Mindcraft, Microsoft and Red Hat Software Inc.,..."

So is Red Hat part of your ZD/M$ conspiracy? If not, then where is their denial/disclaimer? Is it just possible that they *did* audit the tests, and considered them to be fair?

(BTW, PC Week probably meant "torturous" testing, meaning painful and difficult, rather than "tortuous", meaning twisty.)

Ok, for a *Real* Test of wits!

[PoVRAZOR]

Someone should benchmark Linux and NT on some ancient hardware like a 486dx4 100 or something crazy like that!

Re:this is more that just config.

[fnj]

On NT 4.0 you can kludge mounting multiple volumes under a single root using DFS (Distributed File System).

On Win 2000, you can just do it -- mount multiple volumes under a single root using so-called reparse points (basically symbolic links). Best of both worlds: you've got the drive letters as shortcuts, but you've also got the Unix-style hierarchy.

See http://www.pc-depot.com/neat/neat_971105_dfs.html

What all of this really means. Linux is for real.

[dguinan]

Many of you are missing the point entirely here. It is, however, quite subtle (the point). Before I share what I think it is, let me address posit my opinions on a couple of issues:

(A) Linux is just barely learning to do SMP. It was experimental less than 6 months ago. The fact that NT on a Quad XENON showed a higher degree of scalability is essentially meaningless. There are quite a lot of brilliant guys that will make sure that a year from now Linux SMP will show maturity and scalability. Don't sweat the fact that our baby can't beat the olympic runner yet. Let's at least wait 'till he is an adolescent to expect it.

(B) As another poster pointed out, Microsoft has teams of people that tweak the O/S purely for attaining high benchmark results. The configuration used in the test would NEVER be used in the real-world. The company has BILLIONS of dollars to throw away doing such nonsense. Don't sweat it. All our hackers were busy writing the next version of the kernel, not playing with benchmark hacks. It would have been much more interesting to see what the benchmarks are like for an Out-of-the-box NT 4.0 installation on a vanilla (average) PC against an Out-of-the-box Linux distribution on the same machine. My bet would be squarely on Linux.

Okay... Here is the point:

The fact that Microsoft made such a fuss in the first place means that our baby is in the big league. Microsoft is advertising for us! It's amazing.

As any good marketer will tell you, NEVER compare your product to your competitors (even if the comparison is beneficial) if your competitor is less well-known than you. Doing so gives your competitor a larger market presence.

In fact, if I were to express my paranoia (as so many of you have), I would say that Microsoft is using this ploy to attempt to assert that they have competition (having competition benefits them in the Justice Department Trial). My guess is that Microsoft laughs at us and thinks we represent absolutely ZERO threat, which is why Billy boy doesn't mind breaking the cardinal rule of advertising for your competitor. He doesn't think we really represent competition.

All in my humble opinion, of course.

-Dan

Debate good, I enjoy

[Anonymous Cowhard]

Ha ha ha...weeeeee!

Re:this is more that just config.

[ps -onnt]

F: G: H: I:, etc. Good point. However, you can make this transparent to the users with logons scripts and drive mappings, etc. It's not as sexy as mounting a single file system in Unix, but it works.

Re:this is more that just config.

[TummyX]

Just out of interest, you can mount partitions into a folder in Windows 2000.

Re: IE=EXPLORER

[TummyX]

Use Windows 2000 before you make foolish statements.

They are so the same thing. IEXPLORE.EXE(60k) is there for applications which still expect internet explorer to be IEXPLORER.EXE. It's simply a wrapper for the EXPLORE.EXE file.
If you open up Explorer, and close the explorer band on the left, tada, you have internet explorer, with look and feel. If you type in an internet URL, tada you have internet exploerer.
Lets try it the other way round. Open up IE, goto view -> explorer bar -> folders, tada, the folders list appears in the band on the list and you have explorer. Or just type in a local folder address in the address toolbar and tada you have explorer.
THEY ARE THE SAME THING.

ZD =LIARS

[termite666]

I would trust PC weeks tests any more than I trust
Bill Gates to make a quality product.
Most Pc WEEK/ZD Employees are almost incompetent,
just look at ZDNET for proof.Sorry this proves nothing to me .

Re:ZD is partly owned by MS?!?!

[termite666]

I hope not,it's hard to find a job where all the employees are either stupid or just dont care,and if my boss reads this which is doubtful.oh well!!