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Web Server Comparisons

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the benchmarking-for-the-holidays dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "ZDNet is running a story today (yes I know it's Christmas) about several web servers. They have apparently benchmarked these servers. They tested Sun, Linux and MS servers. I'm not sure that I like the way they tested, they didn't include BeOS or tune the configs. Check it out at their web site"My fault - this is totally out of date. Blame it on the egg-nog.

138 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. On Christmas?!?! by The+Iconoclast · · Score: 1

    ... so you know what web server to get for Christmas. :-)

    --
    Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
  2. Hemos - read the dateline by father_guido · · Score: 5

    May 6 1999? That's today?

    Man, I better get ready, the 4th is coming up soon!!! Gotta find the best fireworks vantage point...

    ;)

    1. Re:Hemos - read the dateline by tpck · · Score: 2
      Uhhh... ya...

      I know Slashdot isn't exactly known for its up-to-the-minute reporting of stories, but this is just silly. May 6th? WTF? Its an interesting article, but /. is supposed to be 'News for Nerds.' News as in NEW. This is not new. :)

      Is the dateline wrong? I'm just plain confused. :)

      Maybe Slashdot needs a checklist for people to go through before they submit a story? Something like:

      • Is this less than 6 months old?
      • Are you sure?
      • Absolutely possitive?
      • Willing to bet your life on it?
      • Willing to bet your computer on it?

      Etc. I dunno, this is just plain odd.

  3. BeOS? What about FreeBSD? by Skyline_ · · Score: 2

    I wasn't too concerned that they didn't include BeOS, as it's more of a desktop O/S than a server. FreeBSD on the other hand should of been included, as it's definately a good server O/S, and is used to power busy web sites such as yahoo and hotmail.

  4. Suspicious by fishlet · · Score: 1



    I'm not going to be a troll and say M$ was bought off but ZDNet doesn't exactly have a reputation for being very objective about things. I wish I had the real numbers handy at this moment but I wasn't imagining things when I saw a benchmark showing Linux beat NT under high loads (scalability)

    --


    Blender And Linux Fan
    1. Re:Suspicious by tokengeekgrrl · · Score: 1
      Well, I'll go ahead and make the claim that since ZDNET and MSNBC have a "Content Exchange Alliance ," they cannot possibly be objective in their evaluation.

      Oh, and merry christmas.

      - tokengeekgrrl

  5. BeOS? by Skeezix · · Score: 1
    they didn't include BeOS


    Is BeOS often used as a web platform? I would have liked to see them include FreeBSD, personally.
    ----

    --
    Celebrate the finer things in life
  6. nope... by Issue9mm · · Score: 5

    Nope, this isn't cutting it... I'm not that big a FreeBSD lover, but I am taking exception to the fact that it and its brethren are continually left out of these benchcrafts...er, marks...

    Because of its speed, ease of setup and administration, and a dizzying array of add-on and development products from Microsoft and third parties, we award Microsoft's Web platform--Internet Information Server (IIS) running atop Windows NT--our Editors' Choice.

    Of all the reasons NOT to choose a web server, I think they hit them all. Granted, speed is important. But ease of setup? administration? (maybe) add-on and development products? (must mean ASP, & other proprietary compoonents... that "mixed web" environment they spoke of earlier in the article must not be that important)

    Whatever happened to security, or - since "ease of setup and administration" are such a factor, how about security "out of the box"? Granted, I'm glad to see Linux listed, but (no offense) Caldera's not exactly the distro I'd pick for my web serving. Nor would I use Stronghold. (personal prefs, made through experience)

    Just seems like ZDNet refuses to just get things right. Ordinarily I hate to be the crybaby bitching about the testing, the methods/materials, etc..., but I'm really becoming more and more disappointed in ZDNet's lack of integrity.

    Flame away...

    1. Re:nope... by Super_Frosty · · Score: 1

      Out of Curiosity, what would you use? I'm going to put Linux on one of my boxes, and I'm looking for a good web server to use. What distribution of Linux, and what web server do you guys recommend?

      --
      No comment at this time
    2. Re:nope... by tpck · · Score: 1
      Just seems like ZDNet refuses to just get things right. Ordinarily I hate to be the crybaby bitching about the testing, the methods/materials, etc..., but I'm really becoming more and more disappointed in ZDNet's lack of integrity.

      I have no respect for ZDNet at all. I don't trust a word they say. I rarely visit their site, and when I do, I never, ever click on their banner ads. I also find some of their advertising offensive. (http://ads.x10.com/zdnetmacro/nov19m1.gif and its ilk.)

      They have no decent content, its pathetic. And I hate that Berst guy. I guess I'm just not part of their target audience. Everything they do seems to be aimed at rich neophytes, with more money then sense. (This might explain their bias towards Microsoft products.)

      I've just loaded up their homepage, zdnet.com. Its nasty and vile. Vile vile vile. The whole site is geared towards shoving expensive gadgets down your throat. It looks like a bloody online retailer. Half their 'content' is product reviews, and the rest product compairaisons or 'howtos'.

      Heh, wow. I've counted the number of advertisements on their main page: just 4. zdnet.com/developer has 6. And 7 at gamespot.com. But they have to eat, right? At least the ads are targeted. :)

      Oh, and this isn't flamebait, I hope. :) So don't mark it down as such. Just a few opinions.

    3. Re:nope... by Issue9mm · · Score: 2

      First, it would really depend on the application. For what most people do, any flavor of Linux will do. I like RedHat 6.1 for its "ease of installation and maintenance", which, quite honestly, is far easier to set up than NT. Granted, my machines were all built with *nix systems in mind, so compatability is a key factor.

      If you're looking for something secure, (ie: web commerce, hosting, webmail, etc.) I'd recommend Open/FreeBSD with Apache & SSL. Can't get much tougher than that for the price.

      I hear RedHat has a Secure E-Commerce server, I think it's based on Stronghold, and have heard good things about it, as well as being
      Don't get me wrong, I think I came off kind of harsh in the original post. I'm not saying Stronghold and Caldera are a bad combo, but arguably, since they were primarily testing for speed, Apache would have made more sense. Apache without SSL would have SMOKED stronghold if given the chance.

      Word of advice, ZDNet did get one thing right. It all depends on what you're going to be using it for. Think hard about its application, and then figure out what's best suited for that purpose.

    4. Re:nope... by alexsh · · Score: 2
      must mean ASP, & other proprietary compoonents...
      ASP is by no means a proprietary technology. Take a look at Apache::ASP. It's a perl module, running under Apache/mod_perl, that lets you write ASPs in perl. ASP is actually a very neat solution if you care to look at it. And if you write ASPs in perl (instead of VB), you get to write your scripts in a very nice language, get a much more feature-full technology than CGI, and it's cross-platform too -- those perl ASPs run on Apache with the above module and on NT/IIS with ActiveState PerlScript.
    5. Re:nope... by Issue9mm · · Score: 2

      The most important factor in this is the hardware... RedHat supports some things better than NT, simple fact.

      On my home computer, when I tried out RedHat 6.1, Already having had the partitions set, from box to boot, it was 20 minutes on the Workstation Package. 20 minutes from the time I opened the box, till I was able to boot into X. No config questions, configured X Automatically, detected my mouse, keyboard etc... 20 minutes.

      On the other hand, NT doesn't like my video card, after setup (which easily took 45 minutes, with similar options installed), I had to hunt around on the net to find NT drivers for it.

      Anyway, as I expressed in my original post, which you obviously didn't pay much attention to, I purchase hardware with Linux in mind. Everybody's experience is different, this is mine.

    6. Re:nope... by Trepalium · · Score: 1

      Personally, I prefer PHP3... It has a very 'C'-like syntax that is a bit mixed with Perl syntax. It's also much more readable than Perl is (come on, admit it!), and can be compiled to work in Apache, Netscape Server, or Microsoft IIS, as well as a few other less used httpd's. It also supports database connectivity with a large number of different database products (including mSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, ODBC, postgresql, etc)

      I always find it a little unfair that IIS's proprietary ISAPI is constantly being compared to the slower CGI model. If you notice carefully, IIS CGI and Stronghold CGI are nearly the same speed. I'd REALLY like to see a performance comparison between something like Apache DSO, PHP, and IIS ISAPI/ASP. I'm betting that the results would be MUCH closer than the ISAPI/CGI comparison.

      --
      I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
    7. Re:nope... by alexsh · · Score: 1

      You aren't a very careful reader, are you. You're talking about writing ASP scripts in VB, while the topic of my posting was precisely that you don't have to do that, and that you can write ASP scripts in perl, the language that you praise so much. The only difference then between a perl ASP script and a perl CGI script is that the former has access to the ASP objects which give you much more possibilities than CGI can (such as persistent storage through a session, managed via a cookie). perl is the same good old perl in both. Read the site linked in my original posting.

  7. Hrmph. by Signal+11 · · Score: 3
    I'm reminded of what another slashdotter recently posted:

    - Mindcraft is known for making benchmarks to suit the manufacturer.
    - Benchmarks can be wildly manipulated... - Hence we should call this practice benchcrafting!

  8. I really don't understand. by Skeezix · · Score: 1

    Why do stories like this get posted to slashdot? This is months old and was posted on various linux sites back in May, perhaps even Slashdot. I personally have submitted numerous recent stories that have been rejected for various reasons, but this makes it? Who's running this thing anymore?
    ----

    --
    Celebrate the finer things in life
  9. 2.0.35 kernel by tomreagan · · Score: 2

    The tested using a 2.0.35 kernel. This is about 1+ year old and doesn't contain support for upgraded SMP performance. While an accurate measure of Linux then, it's far from accurate now.

    Figures lie, and liars figure. What else do I have to say?

  10. Wow!!! 2.2 has been released by Mr+Donkey · · Score: 1

    "A few weeks before our testing began, Linus Torvalds (creator and keeper of the Linux kernel) released the Linux 2.2 kernel..."

    This article is a bit dated - May 6, 1999; Put into perspective by the upcoming 2.4.x release

    --
    -----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
  11. They forgot some by fishlet · · Score: 1



    I didn't see any mention of BeOS and MacOS10, unless maybe I didn't look hard enough. BeOS *COULD* be a decent web server I'd imagine, after all it is loosely based on UNIX. MacOS10, havn't heard much mention of that these days but I know it too has a web server and also is based on UNIX. It would be nice for once to see an objective report that doesn't waste all it's time rambling about windows and give equal coverage to all these solutions.

    Ooh, I'm feeling insightful today :-)

    --


    Blender And Linux Fan
    1. Re:They forgot some by KarMann · · Score: 1

      Well, to be fair, it did come from PC Magazine, so that could certainly justify leaving MacOS out. As for the rest, though, screw 'em.

      Good... bad... I'm the one with the gun.

      --
      ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
  12. Old Linux? by battery841 · · Score: 1

    Why is ZDNet comparing NT 4.0 and the latest versions of other operating systems to Linux 2.0.35? That kernel is quite old and lacks a lot of optomizations that the later kernels have.

    1. Re:Old Linux? by Skeezix · · Score: 1

      The primary reason is that this article is OLD. May 6, 1999. I have no clue why this made it to slashdot.
      ----

      --
      Celebrate the finer things in life
  13. Anyone else notice the cache comment? by color+of+static · · Score: 5

    They "tuned the cache" to the point that none of the servers went to disk for their workload. That right there gave NT an advantage. In a real world scenario I'll be out to the disk all the time. I'll be there to get my data during misses, to write my state info for transactions, to log things.
    How much logging was the NT server doing? If it wasn't a lot then they took out the disk subsystem from the equation.
    The whole reason they used the 2.0 kernel was fishy at best also. 2.2 TCP stack broke communications with their win 95 clients?
    Finally, why on earth would I want to do hundreds or thousands of SSL transactions in software. If you are doing more then a few a second you really need a hardware SSL brick or card, which works with all the tested platforms. These people obviously don't understand but one set of solutions.

    1. Re:Anyone else notice the cache comment? by EdMcMan · · Score: 1

      NT writes to the disk a lot!
      Error...Error...Error......

    2. Re:Anyone else notice the cache comment? by Trepalium · · Score: 1

      I'd believe that the 2.2 kernel's TCP stack could've broken some things. I've had almost 0 luck trying to connect a box running 2.2 to MTS ADSL, whereas 2.0 worked flawlessly (well, before MTS decided to switch to the "better" PPPoE-based ADSL solution).

      Also remember that in May, 2.2.x was very immature. It had problems with everything from disk corruption, to a number of drivers not working properly. Things have improved substancially now.

      --
      I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
  14. ZDNet's lack of integrity. by Money__ · · Score: 2
    I would have to agree wholeheartedly with all the comments you've made. Over many many year, ZD publishing (in it's many forms) has proven to be an unrelible, laghingly bias source for microsoft press releases.


    _________________________

    1. Re:ZDNet's lack of integrity. by jrobertray · · Score: 1

      I think this just about sums it up.
      --
      Why Ah Must Scribble GNU

  15. As usual... by Alex+Belits · · Score: 4

    they repeat bogus reasons for using Microsoft servers ("if you have existing business logic, such as pricing strategies, written in Visual Basic..." -- hello, you want to call Visual Basic script, written by an accountant's assistant from HTTP server in secure environment?), measurements made with CGI scripts on Unix (heard of anything else?), their WebBench tests that have nothing to do with real-life environments other than that it uses HTTP, never use Gigabit ethernet cards in their low-latency tests, "demonstrate" that SSL servers are dominated by Microsoft IIS by splitting branded Apache-derivatives into different categories, don't include Unix servers other than Apache and Netscape, omit *BSD, etc.

    In other words, usual advertisers-driven "Editors' Choice" stuff from ZDNet.

    --
    Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
    1. Re:As usual... by IntlHarvester · · Score: 1

      if you have existing business logic, such as pricing strategies, written in Visual Basic...

      That's a good point -- who has core business logic written in VisualBasic? By that logic, any web server supporting COBOL would probably be more applicable. (Even MS's "DNA" strategy is to componentize business logic, allowing it to be language independant, so even from a Microsoft mouthpiece, this is bizzare.)

      Reading between the lines, what I think they are implying is that Microsoft's environment allows low-end VB developers to be converted to web developers without them having to learn a new language. That might be a consideration in some places, but it's hardly a huge point in IIS's favor. And you can't exactly take your typical VB client-server front end and push the "Recompile as Web Page" button.
      --

      --
      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
    2. Re:As usual... by arc.light · · Score: 1

      I'm not suggesting it's a good idea to write business logic in VB, but there is a book on doing so under SAP R/3, so *someone* must be doing it.

  16. Re:Old stuff; any new developments? by ChadN · · Score: 2

    I don't understand how the 2.2 kernel didn't work for win 95 clients (as stated in the article). Was this ever true, and if so, for what version of the 2.2 kernel?

    Also, what is the state of threading in apache? Is there currently any support for it (the article states the 1.2.x version they used didn't support it at all)

    Not a very bad article (it is somewhat old now), but maybe not to relevant any longer. (And they seems to thing that web based administration is easier than config files... well, whatever floats your boat.)

    --
    "It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
  17. Not too bad by noop · · Score: 2

    Linux really didn't seem to do poorly. In fact I couldn't tell a difference between the platforms..
    When using CGI, they all seemed to do about the same, yes, the two that ran NSAPI and ISAPI kicked the living crap out of the ones running CGI scripts, but I'll bet if they'd slapped mod-perl onto the Apache server, Linux would have caught right up..

    greg

    --
    dronf!
  18. Did they compare prices? by jeroenb · · Score: 1
    I often hear people say that running a Linux/BSD webserver is only cheaper is you have a lot of time on your hands. However, most people running websites don't do all the site administration themselves, so for them it's not really an issue.

    I've personally used NT for a lot of development and wanted to have a site hosted on Windows NT, because I knew some ASP and was familiar with ISAPI. But where I live (Europe, I've checked most countries here) Windows NT hosting is usually three times the price of Linux/BSD hosting. So I went for a Linux server and discovered that (after trying out some other hosters for other sites) having a database or other extensions installed is usually also very expensive on NT (try getting them to let you install your own ISAPI extensions) and that most Linux/BSD hosters would happily let me use their (MySQL/PostgreSQL)database and stuff like PHP and my own CGI-scripts.

    Administration-issues are only important for a small bunch of people.

    1. Re:Did they compare prices? by Compuser · · Score: 1

      Actually big companies do care about price.
      The way an OS finds its way into IT shops is
      when they need a quick solution for some
      problem, often behind the PHB's back. If it
      works it sticks.

  19. Re:you bunch of woosies by ChadN · · Score: 1

    We admitted it for some class of setups after the Mindcraft benchmarks, and worked to improve the areas of deficiency. That still didn't make the benchmarks useful to 95% of people needing to deploy web-servers.

    And "wussies" is spelled "wussies". Although I'll probably be woosy come New Year's Eve...

    --
    "It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
  20. Not multiprocessor scalable? by Asparfame · · Score: 1

    What a load of bull! How much do you want to bed that they didn't turn on the SMP option in the kernel?

    --

    There's no reason for a sig here.

  21. "Webbench" of 600 or 4000 - It Just Doesn't Matter by rbrander · · Score: 4
    Their graphs show the worst servers flattening out at "Webbench" numbers of 600, where the best go up to 4000.

    They don't show the formula that gives the number, but from similar web benchmarking reviews, I know that even the worst ones are serving up hundreds of page-views per second. The best are maxing out multiple 10Mbps Ethernet cards - i.e. you need a T3 line to actually provide the bandwidth you're serving.

    If you can afford that, you aren't reading Ziff-Davis to make your product decisions or even find your shortlist.

    These kinds of servers are only needed by the big ISPs and the eBays of the world - the whole review is only of interest to a few thousand webmasters.

    My employer is a city government serving some 860,000 people with a mostly static, partly active web site about all their city services and taxes and utility bills - and it rarely exceeds a few tens of pageviews per second.

    Forget all the sniping about tuning and benchmark methodology; the really stupid thing about these product comparisons is that they imply that more than a fraction of one percent of their audience should even care about which one wins. For the rest of us, a free product running on a free OS and hardware that costs less than the monthly cost of our Internet bandwidth can meet all our needs.

  22. Microsoft Wins out again? by asqui · · Score: 1

    well, what can I say?

    Lets drink to yet another microsoft victory!!!

    hahaha...

    well maybe thye didnt configure the other boxes properly and whatnot, and maybe microosft's solution is not the best (no dooubt you all think so, to prove it, this will be down to -1 in minutes!) but one thing I have to say is that Microsoft certainly seems to be getting its act together quite well lately!

    I have to say that Windows 2000 is an absolutely magnificent improvement on previous operating systems. I've been running it for months, ever since the first relatively stable releases, and I still havent seen the blue screen of death! (Well once, but that was cause I was messing with my hardware and my RAM was screwy...) Its much more stable, I'm getting uptimes ive never dreamed before! I just ended an uptime of more than a month! and I dont even try to run my system nonstop (so all you Linux buffs up for 318 days can shut it!)

    In any case its an improvement on Win98... the defult background color is a welcome change... (oh and they even changed the tint of blue background used on the BSoD, it too looks better now)

    But one definite loss...one definite indelible black mark on microosft's good name... I was much dissapointed to find that Windows 2000 Advanced Server does not ship with that silly pinball game... (no wait, I probably havent seen it around since I specifically didnt install the games... Im starting to miss solitare to tell you the truth :)

    But dont flame too hard, because I do run Linux, and I do think its a much more hardcore OS when you get to now it. In fact the only reason I dont use it fulltime is becuase I cant be bothered to switch, and my current linux box (an IBM compatible DX/50) isn't really a supreme specimen to learn on. But I promise you, that as soon as I get that new 1 gigahertz box I've always wanted, I'll retite this one to an exclusive Linux box, and then I'll really be able to use Linux!!

    (Apparently linux doesnt like the PS/2 architecture... or old ATAPI SCSI CD-Roms for that matter... took 24 solid hours of moving hardware around from different computers to finally get redhat installed... and even now it refuses to do some reasonable things! Im putting it all down to the oldness of the computer its on [rather than my lack of competence] -- that sig on the bottom is not a joke, after repeated attempts I couldnt get it to know my network card, so I eventually gave up...)

    1. Re:Microsoft Wins out again? by Trepalium · · Score: 1

      Yes, and he lost his token.

      --
      I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
    2. Re:Microsoft Wins out again? by asqui · · Score: 1

      ROFLOL...hehheheheh

      I dont know why I'm laughing so hard when the jokes on me... but anyways, disregarding that little slip up, everything else I said about stability is true! I havent forgotten what a blue screen looks like (I still run 95 from time to time...)

      You can laugh at me, but...err, I dunno... Laugh all you want :)

    3. Re:Microsoft Wins out again? by asqui · · Score: 1

      hahhaha, well at least I /try/ to make a constructive argument :))

  23. Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    They recommend NT & IIS as their editor's choice but Netcraft says:

    www.zdnet.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris

  24. Re:Praise The Lord: A Slashdot Sermon by mangu · · Score: 1

    According to historical evidence, Jesus was a pharisee rabbi crucified in 88 B.C.E. If he was 33 at the time, this means he is 2121 years old now.

  25. hmm by SnowZero · · Score: 1

    If only speed matters, and not security, why on earth are they benchmarking SSL? Hello, anybody home?

    Linux still has catching up to do to be on par with IIS in some types of static content; and we can again thank ZD for a meaningless benchmark that is no help in such development efforts.

    Personally I can't wait to see what will happen with the 2.4 kernel with khttpd and phttpd on the horizon...

  26. Discuss why Linux didn't do as well as you hoped? by Speare · · Score: 4

    Maybe you'll consider (Score -1: Troll), because I'm suggesting rational discourse over religious whining.

    It appears from this thread of comments that the slashdot community is unhappy about all sorts of things that don't seem central to the issue. The comments becry ZDNet's advertising vs testing integrity and methodology, Caldera distro's shortcomings, Stronghold's performance vs other Apache releases, and why they didn't choose the EndOS-BeOS of solutions.

    The issue, as I would see it, is "what can Linux do, to fare better in third-party comparisons?"

    It appears from the article that there are several reasons that ZDNet listed why they felt Linux/Apache/Stronghold was limited. Let's start with those.

    • ZDNet chose to tune ALL the servers to have 68Mb of web source material and at least 68Mb of memory disk cache.
      Why did this give NT an unfair advantage? Why does Linux (or particularly the Caldera distro) solution not deal with RAM-rich servers as well as NT? I think the poster who complained of this meant the inverse: if it were a RAM-poor server, Linux would have the advantage in disk accesses.
    • ZDNet used multiprocessor servers.
      All religious handwaving aside, why did NT fare better by spinning threads than Apache could do by spinning processes? What is the big bottleneck in managing a process, that managing a thread doesn't have? They were using a brand-new MP kernel straight from Linus. Will the Linux kernel mature to deal with SMP situations and massive numbers of similar threads or processes better?
    • ZDNet suggested that in-process programming worked better for all the hairy e-commerce they decided to test.
      Though I think they should have configured some PHP or Mod_Perl into their mix, just as they had to bend to the SSL3-only constraint for another platform, they have a point. Writing modules is the way to go, to get inside the server and run fast. Besides PHP and Mod_Perl, where can Linux go to improve?

    Most of these seem to suggest that ZDNet could have configured their Linux servers more like real-world Linux admins would, and would find better performance. This does talk poorly of Linux's ease-of-use, though they lay it on thick when they cry about config files. This is an education issue.

    Slashdot is already slanted (pardon the pun) towards the Linux solution. Not every problem is a nail, and there are even different hammers for different nails. Let's be objective and constructive, instead of whining about every possible outside excuse. Improve the tool, and the tool will become the standard.

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
  27. Re:ZDnet isn't an e-commerce site by Brento · · Score: 1

    Remember that this article was reviewing e-commerce site tools, not just regular site tools. They made it pretty apparent in the beginning of the article that Linux has a virtual lock on things that don't involve e-commerce.

    --
    What's your damage, Heather?
  28. Why so much commercial software? by Imperator · · Score: 2

    It seems that ZDNet doesn't like to acknowledge any non-commercial software, and went out of their way to test commercial products wherever possible. CodeWarrior won't run on Caldera, AFAIK. :)

    --

    Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
  29. Re:Discuss why Linux didn't do as well as you hope by Brento · · Score: 1

    Right on. I'll also add a few things:

    One of the knee-jerk posters complained that ZD didn't use the latest kernel, then somebody re-read it and realized that this article was written way back in May when that kernel wasn't available. Even if it had been written yesterday, the NT camp could then legitimately complain that ZD should have used Windows 2000, which is a better web server and is theoretically available today (check your newsgroups.)

    Every time one of these gets posted, people scream and moan about the box not being configured correctly. "If only we'd have been at the helm, we'd have won that race," they say, complaining about how ZD didn't do hours and hours of tuning work to get the Linux box just right. You know what? They didn't put hours and hours into tuning the NT box, either, and the result still stands.

    --
    What's your damage, Heather?
  30. father_guido - read the post! by adraken · · Score: 2

    hemos didn't say that zdnet was running it today, that stupid anonymous coward said that they were running it today. hemos was not wrong in this case. he just was kinda lazy to edit the post or add a disclaimer "actually, it's may 6th.." but, in any case, may 6th, 1999 was a long time ago. that probably explains why they were running linux 2.0.35 and not something reasonably current (i.e. 2.2.x).

    --
    -- adraken
    1. Re:father_guido - read the post! by father_guido · · Score: 1

      And that also explains why it compares IIS 4, instead of IIS 5, which has been released as well.

  31. ... by NightHwk · · Score: 1

    First, the story is from may, so it doesnt even count for xmas in july...
    Second, what is stronghold and why didnt they use apache? Was stronghold a release name for an old apache version? am I missing something? They used IIS which is standard for NT, isn't apache the standard for linux servers?
    I'm sure had they used MSFrontPage Personal WebServer for their NT benchmarks, the scores would have been more comparitive.
    Ah well, standard benchcraft from the king of benchcrafting.

    Merry Xmas!
    NH

    --

    1. Re:... by tweek · · Score: 1

      Don't get your panties in a wad jsut yet. Stronghold is just a hardened apache. It's like adding SSL yourself but to the umteenth power. These guys know apache ;)

      --
      "Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
  32. Re:They forgot some [nope] by Zurk · · Score: 1

    If you've ever used BeOS you will know that its more a single user OS in the same class as Windoze but with a better architecture. I mean theres no login and everyone is root by default. The only good thing is the POSIX compliant shell and ease of use. Mac OS X is based on BSD (and basically the same as any BSD). Note that this article is dated and not a serious benchmark efort in any case.

  33. Re:Praise The Lord: A Slashdot Sermon: Correction by Super_Frosty · · Score: 1

    With regard to said sermon, a correction has been issued. Instead of 2000 years, the author meant, uh, 2121. Note also that said sermon was a joke, and that this is Christmas Day, and that some moderators have no sense of humor.

    I am the plausible religious zealot troll. No sermon or good wishes, express or implied, were meant.

    (C) Plausible Religious Zealot Troll, 1999
    All Rights Reserved

    --
    No comment at this time
  34. ZDNet's methods reveal intentional bias by mangu · · Score: 1

    If comparing CGI scripts with ISAPI modules is acceptable, then I can easily "prove" that anything running in Linux is much faster than the equivalent program in Windows 2000(TM). Just compare an interpreted GW-Basic program in W2K with the same algorithm compiled in C on Linux.

    These benchmarkets are just thinly disguised press releases, not responsible journalism.

    The question you propose on "what can Linux do, to fare better in third-party comparisons?" is asked by thousands of users worldwide, not with marketing in mind, but with the objective of making our own systems run better and faster. Free code allows one to improve our systems, and many of us do so, or try to.

  35. Re:Did anyone View Source? by cperciva · · Score: 1

    Some caches don't like expires=now, so it is common to just put in a date from the ancient past.
    The story is out of date, but not quite that much out of date ;-)

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  36. Re:Free/BSD and Redhatian bloat by cale · · Score: 1

    I don't think so, I just did an ftp install of both FreeBSD and OpenBSD recently (loading up a gateway/ftp server at home) and they were both MUCH shorter downloads than something like rh6.1 which would have prolly taken longer than I am willing to wait. Personally I settled on OpenBSD as it was smaller and who can ever argue with a very secure os like that. The biggest thing that bugs me about that artice is that they didn't even recognize the BSD family, any of who would have made a strong showing.

  37. Re:They forgot some [nope] by cale · · Score: 1

    IIRC They combined some features of netBSD and FreeBSD to come up with what they used in Mac OS X

  38. ZDnet, please update your by Inoshiro · · Score: 2

    ancient kernels available for download. 2.2.0 .... :-P
    ---

    --
    --
    Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
  39. One performance issue nobody is mentioning by ebrandsberg · · Score: 3

    Recentally, I setup a Linux router with 8 10Mb/s feeds (full duplex)inbound with one 100Mb/s feed going out. What happened is that at about 20K interrupts a second (about 70Mb/s), the system, which was running fine (about 97% idle) started sucking up cpu time. By 30K interrupts, it had saturated the CPU. In this setup, I made use of the vlan code (it was attached to a vlan switch), and used an Alteon AceNIC which does interrupt coalessing. The AceNIC under the same loads ran with about 1600 interrupts a second, and continued to run with about 97-98% idle time at the same traffic levels that had pegged the system before. I'm wondering if special drivers that are doing interrupt coalessing are making the difference on the NT boxes. Assuming that each transfer generates on a WebBench 20 interrupts (or more), then the 1K connections a second and the CPU load are really understandable.

    On another note, why not have different groups do benchmarking with a fixed $$ amount that they can use to purchase equipment, as well as fixing a $$ amount per hour that they have to spend configuring the servers. This would be a MUCH more realistic benchmark scenario as the cost of equipment and time are realistic factors in the real world.

    Erik

  40. Re:Discuss why Linux didn't do as well as you hope by cale · · Score: 1

    The fact that they came up with a BS reason for using an old kernel, even when that was written back in May is what people are really complaining about. I haven't heard any reports of any of the 2.2.* series' tcp-ip stack "breaking" connection with win95 boxes. They should have used the latest RELEASED kernel, or just gotten whatever updates were availible from caldera. Seeing as Windows 2k hasn't been RELEASED yet (I don't care to use pirated beta version from a newsgroup) there is no good reason for them to have used it. I do agree that linux might be a little harder to configure, but i prefer having one or two text files to tweak my webserver as opposed to 10's of tiny menus and trying to remember where each option was.

  41. Re:Praise The Lord: A Slashdot Sermon by cale · · Score: 1

    Before the Common Era (IIRC), its been a while since i gave two shits about being politcally correct

  42. more test cases please by two_neurons · · Score: 1

    They could have tested Solaris on an Intel box and they could have also tested Apache on NT. Obviously, the multi-processor issue with Apache will be sorted out in the future ... the Linux kernel just became multi-processor friendly.

    But, they fail to mention these issues with their tests. But, what can you expect from a pop-culture magazine like PC Magazine?

  43. Bitter are we? by decipher_saint · · Score: 1
    If Linux or BSD won everyone would be talking about how 'accurate' ZDNet was.


    NT and IIS might not be the best, but there is something to be said about ease of use. I can set up an e-commerce site that supports a high amount of traffic - with a minimum of server tweaking - in a very short time with a minimum of hassle.


    Linux is a great... until you need to use it

    --
    crazy dynamite monkey
    1. Re:Bitter are we? by tpaine · · Score: 1

      Not bitter, just amused. Did you notice the squibs in the article about Linux's reliability? Unix servers (and this includes Linux) tend to have uptimes measured in years. When was the last time you saw an NT server go for more than a few months without BSOD'ing?

  44. umm..no by CrAlt · · Score: 1
    I'm not a hard core BSD user but I know that NetBSD (www.netbsd.org) is the most portable OS...not Linux.

    And 4 diffrent Open Source versions of BSD? I thought there was only 3- FreeBSD,NetBSD and OpenBSD. How many diffrent Linux distro's are there again?

    I too would like to see some real benchmarks with NT vs Linux vs FreeBSD. Though I run linux on my PC's I have tryed FreeBSD, and it is faster. Linux kiddies like your self would learn a little more if they just tryed something OTHER then linux for once. This If-Its-Not-Linux-then-it-SuX thing most /.ers got going is kinda funny in a way. I always thought Open Source users had a open mind...but I guess thats not the way it is on /. :)

    --
    I have to return some videotapes...
  45. Re:Discuss why Linux didn't do as well as you hope by PraveenS · · Score: 1

    Don't be a dumbass. Can't you see that they didn't even use the 2.2 kernel? In fact, if you read the article, the 2.2 kernel was too good for the test! It's improved stack implementation _BROKE_ the Win95 boxes! Why did they use WinBlows clients then if they didn't work properly? Use some common sense.

  46. Re:Praise The Lord: A Slashdot Sermon by KarMann · · Score: 1

    In most cases, yes, but wouldn't it be silly to say that he was crucified 88 years Before Christ, since that is what 'BC' stands for, you know. Not just politically correct, but also logically.
    Pay attention to the context next time, not just your flame-trigger keywords.

    Good... bad... I'm the one with the gun.

    --
    ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.
  47. why did they bother? by browser_war_pow · · Score: 1

    What did they hope to prove by pitting the 2.0 kernel against NT and Solaris rather than the 2.2 kernel? Why don't they pit NT 3.5x against 2.0 and see which comes out on top. I think 2.4 will do some real damage though. Hmmm it would be easy to see BeOS go against NT..... no competition there as a workstation OS goes.

  48. linux runs on a lot more than x86 by nester · · Score: 1

    why don't they ever test it on anything but x86? one of the strengths of linux is that it runs on many different archs, so you can use decent archs and aren't stuck with x86 (as you pretty much are w/ windows). this seems like a huge oversight to me.

    1. Re:linux runs on a lot more than x86 by Ineversaidthat · · Score: 1

      As of this past summer/early fall, support for Microsoft products on the Alpha was dropped. It's no longer "pretty much" x86, it's the only game in town. And linux _rocks_ on the Alpha :-)

  49. Re:"Webbench" of 600 or 4000 - It Just Doesn't Mat by arc.light · · Score: 1

    The best are maxing out multiple 10Mbps Ethernet cards - i.e. you need a T3 line to actually provide the bandwidth you're serving.

    Without addressing the issue of whether *this* benchmark is valid, what if you are providing web services over a local intranet with a gigabit backbone and most clients on switched-100? What if that web server was the web interface for a heavily-used ERP application, or a Product Data Management solution over HTTP-DAV? Wouldn't the web server that was able to perform at the high-end matter in this case?

    You don't need to be a big ISP or an eBay to make use of such bandwidth - if it's local. This scenario describes the company I work for, and we have only ~200 employees.

  50. OT: banner whores by nester · · Score: 1

    banner ads are getting out of hand. all these sites have about 15k of sidebar links, 10k or so banner ad, then usually less than 1k of actual content. often it's just two paragraphs before you have to click "next". another cheat trick is to have a top 10 list split into 10pages + intro + conclusion. all these banner ads and blatant tricks make tv ads appear suttle(sp).

    1. Re:OT: banner whores by csprague · · Score: 1

      Worse is the ones that use Java...esp. when you're running Netscape on a 486DX2/66...

  51. Re:Old stuff; any new developments? by orcrist · · Score: 5

    Also, what is the state of threading in apache?

    Apache 2.0 will be a hybrid forking/threading server thus giving it some of the speed advantages of threading while maintaining the advantage of multiple processes that every one of these benchmarks never mentions: stability.

    If for some reason one of the threads in a multi-threading server crashes, it can bring the whole server down with it. If one of Apache's child servers crashes... Apache forks a new one to replace it. The new design will be a compromise with several preforked children, each of which is multi-threading. Then let's see what the benchmarks look like :-)

    Chris

    --
    San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
  52. The _Real Troll_ was the original post! by Ineversaidthat · · Score: 1

    Notice that he/she implied that this May 6th article was posted today, and actually stated that there was _no_ tuning at all (at least slightly contrary to the article). This was from back in the mindcraft days (or a bit prior), which in internet time is nearly forever. Yeah, the article itself has a bunch of holes in it, but being from almost 8 months ago isn't it just water over the dam?

  53. And a link... by orcrist · · Score: 1

    Here's the link to info about Apache 2.0 which I actually wanted to include in my post above:

    http://www.apacheweek.com/features/apac he20

    Chris

    --
    San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
  54. Take matters into your own hands. by prodeje · · Score: 1

    junkbuster
    ..
    "We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."

    --

    Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.

  55. Re:Praise The Lord: A Slashdot Sermon by mangu · · Score: 1

    Ironically, since there is no year zero, Christ was born either *before* or *after* himself. My proposal for calendar reform is this: 1 before Christ is the year before he was born. He was born in year 0 DC (zero *during* Christ), and crucified in year 33 DC. The first year after his crucifixion would be 0 AC (zero after Christ). C-language style for array numbering works good for us Unix hackers. According to the canonical dating used by Dionysius Exiguus, we would be now in year 1965 AC, which would leave me enough time to retire without having to worry about Y2K. Merry Armageddon and a Happy Looting to all.

  56. What? by prodeje · · Score: 1
    Just because something will be on computers shipping in 2 months does *not* mean it is released. Released means that it is *avalible* to the public.

    FYI, 2/17/2000 is the day that it will be released to the public. Read for yourself if you don't believe me.
    ..
    "We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."

    --

    Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.

    1. Re:What? by Relforn · · Score: 1

      I guess, then, that no version of Solaris has ever been released. And definitely no version of Digital Unix for the Alpha. I doubt if anybody reading this has seen it sitting on the shelf at a consumer-oriented 'local computer store' where it can be 'bought off the shelf.'

      Heck, not a single version of MS-DOS has been released then either, as they were ALL available exclusively as OEM products bundled with hardware (IBM's PC-DOS was available retail, and a number of places illegally sold unbundled copies of MS-DOS, of course)

      Here's a clue for you- not everything for computers, in particular products for server-class and enterprise-level systems, is available at your friendly Computer Shoppe as a retail product.

    2. Re:What? by arc.light · · Score: 1

      Actually, Compaq and other vendors will be shipping systems with Win2K installed next month, as stated in this article.
      Also, so-called "golden code" (not beta) CDs are available now to members of the early adopter program for Win2K... so it has been released.

  57. offensive? by CrAlt · · Score: 1

    how can you find http://ads.x10.com/zdnetmacro/nov19m1.gif offensive? Are you amish (omish?) or something? Its just a good looking girl with a white shirt on.

    --
    I have to return some videotapes...
  58. AD != after Christ by KeithT · · Score: 1

    AD stands for anno domini, "in the year of our lord."

    --

    "The best way to do mathematics is to be creatively lazy." -I. M. Isaacs
  59. Something easyer... by CrAlt · · Score: 1

    Though this isnt as nice as junkbuster it is easy as hell to setup. http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~atman/spam/adblock.h tml

    --
    I have to return some videotapes...
  60. NT Is Faster by BrookHarty · · Score: 1
    Bad thing about these tests, is that we know NT is faster. Does that mean I want to use it in a mission critical operations? NO.

    M$ Can tweak NT/W2k so it serves pages faster, but it is still unreliable for most applications...

    People like to state the NT can be very stable, how many apps do you have running? How much downtime per year do you have? How much time do you spend fixing problems?

    My biggest grip was you couldnt telnet into NT and restart processes. W2K has that. NT can try to become more like *nix platform, it still has a long way to go..

    Im going to stick with Solaris and Apache. Im under staffed, and over worked.
    NT is not the answer.

    Also another sad part is most E-Commerce packages are for NT.

    1. Re:NT Is Faster by Zagato-sama · · Score: 1

      You can't telnet into NT and restart a process? This is amazing news to me as I telnet into my NT box on a daily basis. Thanks for letting me know that I have a fake telnet service running, I'll switch to Linux immediately ;)

    2. Re:NT Is Faster by BrookHarty · · Score: 1
      NT4 didnt come with a telnet deamon, W2K does.
      I know there are shareware deamons, only took 2 years for someone to write one.

    3. Re:NT Is Faster by Chas · · Score: 2

      Zag. You should know that it's not nice to tweak people.

      Especially since you're inaccurate.

      You CANNOT telnet into NT. You CAN find a shareware telnet service, but you cannot telnet into an OOB NT box. Period.

      I know you're in love with your Win2K box, but sheesh. Please note that he DID mention Win2K being telnetable.

      *SPANKSPANK*

      Bad boy! Now you have to listen to Reba West again!


      Chas - The one, the only.
      THANK GOD!!!

      --


      Chas - The one, the only.
      THANK GOD!!!
    4. Re:NT Is Faster by Relforn · · Score: 1

      Umm, there are more than 'shareware' daemons.

      If I was so inclined at the moment, I could telnet into my NT 4.0 box and start up an X app to display on this machine as it runs on the NT machine. Or I could build the X app with GCC in the telnet session, linking it with the Motif libraries, and then display it on this machine. And I can telnet in simultaneously using any number of the User accounts set up on that machine and talk between the sessions (using the same command-line talk program that ye olde Unix boxen use.) My NT box has Interix installed, of course. It definitely wasn't shareware.

    5. Re:NT Is Faster by Zagato-sama · · Score: 1

      Heh

    6. Re:NT Is Faster by Zagato-sama · · Score: 1

      Actually there is a NT services for Unix downloadable pack which also includes a telnet server. (For NT4) As for shareware daemons..hell, there are quite a few shareware, freeware, commercialware, etc. There is also several ssh ports for NT AFAIK. Obviously NT is not the answer for you, however it's the answer for someone out there, hence the commercial packages.

  61. Ironic by 703 · · Score: 2

    Apparently

    www.zdnet.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris.

    Why did they choose that platform if the IIS on NT solution earns the editors choice?

    Or the Webmasters of Zdnet.com disagrees with the Editors?


    1. Re:Ironic by Trepalium · · Score: 1

      It seems that very few companies are stupid enough to run IIS on their webservers. It seems that MS IIS's biggest market is small ISPs, and webhosting companies. Hell, Apache has nearly a 60% market saturation, whereas IIS is only about 22%.

      Besides, Solaris (on a Sun server) is usually a better solution than any x86 platform (for potential reliability and performance, at least). Arguably the biggest thing holding back the x86 is the beast known as "backwards compatibility". If we didn't have to worry about the legions of programs that would be broken by having MORE than 16 IRQs, not having the CGA CRTCs, doing away with the ISA DMA controllers, not having "shadow" IO ports for things like the IDE controllers, etc. I'd personally love to be able to do away with all these things, but then how'd I be able to play all those old 8088/80286 CGA games?!?

      --
      I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
  62. How about the AppleShare IP 6.3? by RottenApple · · Score: 1

    Well, At the homepage of Apple Computer Inc., they claim that the AppleShare IP 6.3 provides a good web server. Is there any result of comparison including the AppleShareIP?

  63. Beos workstation my arse by jemfinch · · Score: 1

    Yeah, except for the part about doing work. NT may crash, but it does actually have useful programs (photoshop, MSOffice, etc.) as opposed to beos which has...hmm...Gobe Productive?

    Jeremy

    --
    Looking for a Python IRC bot?
    1. Re:Beos workstation my arse by browser_war_pow · · Score: 1

      "Anonymity on Slashdot has become a haven for the ignorant and childish. I say remove it." I agree 100%

  64. Re:ZDnet's X10 pr0n ad by British · · Score: 1

    Heh. I've so far seen the busty chick with an obvious push-up bra, then several months ago I saw the blonde who looks like the poster child for being an airhead. Collect them all!

  65. Re:Praise The Lord: A Slashdot Sermon by jemfinch · · Score: 1

    There is absolutely no historical support for such a statement. I'm sure all the people who read this and assume that "it's posted on slashdot, it must be correct" are thankful for your complete misinformation.

    I can find myriad historians who would date Jesus' birth to approximately 5-6 BC. I challenge you to find any substantial contingent of historians with proper credentials (ie. not "Harry's House of History" degrees) to state that Jesus was born prior even to 10 BC.

    Oh, and supposing you can find such information, how do you explain the fooling of billions of people into thinking that he was born ~115 years before they think he was?

    Jeremy

    --
    Looking for a Python IRC bot?
  66. SMP for web applications by jetson123 · · Score: 2
    ZDNet used multiprocessor servers. All religious handwaving aside, why did NT fare better by spinning threads than Apache could do by spinning processes?

    Probably because people don't bother tuning the Linux kernel for good SMP performance on web tasks.

    Why would that be? Because it doesn't make sense to pay the premium for four processors in a box when for less money you can get four processors in four boxes and quadruple your disk and network bandwidth. People use SMP on Windows mostly because of software licensing costs, because of per-box colocation costs, or because it sounds good. In my experience, SMP on Linux is mostly used for getting really high performance on numerical and scientific tasks.

    1. Re:SMP for web applications by Graymalkin · · Score: 2

      I hope someone moderates this post up.

      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  67. in-process server modules by jetson123 · · Score: 2
    ZDNet suggested that in-process programming worked better for all the hairy e-commerce they decided to test. [...] Besides PHP and Mod_Perl, where can Linux go to improve?

    Apache has a perfectly good in-process module API; mod_perl is written in it. You can write that kind of code yourself if you want to write C/C++ extensions to the Apache server.

    I consider it pretty foolish, however, to write web server extensions for an E-commerce site in a language without runtime error checking or fault isolation. Applications specific modules simply can't receive the testing and debugging that Apache itself has received. You are lucky if the server crashes due to a bug; more likely, you are going to ship an unpredictable quantity of widgets to an unpredictable address as a stray pointer leads to overwriting some of your order data.

    The performance difference between native code and Perl, Tcl, Python, Java, or PHP3 simply don't matter in most web applications: applications are generally bandwidth or database bound. Given that simple fact, you should use the safest and easiest language to program in. For single programmer projects, that's likely to be a scripting language. For large, component-based multi-programmer projects, that's likely to be Java, OO Pascal, Eiffel, or something of that kind.

    1. Re:in-process server modules by IntlHarvester · · Score: 1


      Interestingly, one of IIS 5's most touted features is to run ASP out-of-process. ZDNet has already honked on this in their glowing review of Win2000.
      --

      --
      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
  68. New Performance Index: $ per max. hits by James+McP · · Score: 1

    I think someone touched on this, but this is IMPORTANT since even ZDnet said this:
    Apache and linux's process based system works better by adding boxes than adding processors/resources in a single box.
    So here's the deal: figure out how much it costs to buy OS, software, hardware, and setup the system. Determine its optimal performance (which may NOT be peak performance). If Linux still doesn't have SMP at a cost effective level, spec out single CPU boxes and save the cash for entire other systems. (Don't flame me for saying it doesn't work, I'm saying it might be cost effective to not use it until 2.4) If Solaris' cost-performance is better on Sun hardware (duh) then use it.
    Then, take those numbers and ask ZDNET to append them to their article.
    We know linux has an automatic $1000 price advantage over NT/Solaris which is about a third the cost of adding another server. I'm not sure about Stronghold's cost vs IIS/NS server/etc, but I'm guessing it's not as expensive as IIS. And with the exception of the "custom" API's (NSAPI, ISAPI), Linux performed as well as the other servers, even with the use of a twitchy old version of caldera.
    Personally, I'd want to see the addition of a mod_perl'd server to represent the Linux equivalent of NSAPI and ISAPI, but with the bonus that perl stuff is PORTABLE, much more so than NS or IIS-only scripts.
    If we suggest this right to ZDNET, when they review the new W2k's web server and put it up against a decent server linux (w/kernel 2.4 we can hope) they may add a price/performance index.

    --
    I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
  69. True enough! by decipher_saint · · Score: 1

    :-)

    --
    crazy dynamite monkey
  70. Apache vs Sun Web Server on Solaris? by InfiniterX · · Score: 1

    They only show Apache running on Linux, but seem to overlook the fact that it will run on other UNIX (like Solaris 2.7 on their Sun E-250 that they used in the test)...

    Is the Sun Web Server that much better tuned for Solaris? In the static page view comparison it blew just about everything else away, but they conveniently decided not to include Apache.

  71. Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by arc.light · · Score: 1

    If you have only 200 users, how are you going to be generating that kind of load?

    By uploading and downloading multi-hundred megabyte CAD drawings and other such bandwidth consuming activity - such as video conferencing - over HTTP. Or by being in a much larger company with a similar, high-bandwidth infrastructure.

    My point is that the firm I work for only has 200 users, yet we have more than enough bandwidth to saturate the web servers tested in the benchmark. There must be many companies with larger user bases that are capable of generating this kind of traffic over the LAN, without being eBay or a huge ISP. Not all web servers publish over the Internet, many publish over an intranet.

    Our company may not be able to afford a T3, but we don't need one if the client is in the same building, capiche? Good. Such performance issues are relevant to more people than the poster three levels up described.

    1. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by BJH · · Score: 2


      Shit, yes, I do huge file transfers and video conferencing over HTTP all the time!

      F'chrissakes, use a protocol that actually suits what you're trying to do. FTP, NFS or SMB for file transfers; one of the streaming protocols for video conferencing. (Actually, come to think of it, video conferencing over HTTP isn't really feasible; what are you doing, breaking the video stream up into frames, converting them to JPEGs and pushing them to the clients?!)

    2. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by rbrander · · Score: 2
      I'm most impressed by the "multi-hundred megabyte CAD drawings". My biggest CAD drawing is of our 200,000 water services, 20,000 water mains, etc and runs only 25MB. (Microstation design file).

      Since this is an Intranet, have you considered just having the Web server provide only a "file:///" URL and letting a file server handle this massive load? They're much better tuned for it.

      The point is very well taken, however - bandwidth is not the limitation in a LAN. Still, the problem doesn't come up in my workplace - and we're talking 4000 seats. Our biggest Intranet server also maxes at a few tens of hits per second.

      Perhaps that's an indication of our Intranet usage being backward or something, but I don't think we're all that far behind.

      A larger factor is your computing philosophy - is your Intranet a highly centralized "mainframe" style with one provider of information to many-many-many? With so many diverse departments in a civic government, ours is more spread out among many servers, even though the IT department runs them all out of one room. If you put hundreds of functions from hundreds of information providers onto one web server, then its security arrangements and the tuning of the server become very complex.

      Lastly, if you have very heavy web usage because your corporation is practically run from a couple of major applications - say sales management or the accounting system - it may be better to consider that this is not best done with web apps but with a "traditional" client/server app installed on every machine.

      To sum up, with the options to serve lots of (or big) files with a file server, to split multiple services into many servers on the KISS principle, or admitting that not everything is best done as Web apps, I again return to my point: that not that much of the total Web server market cares about getting over 1000 pageviews/sec - even on Intranets.

    3. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by arc.light · · Score: 1

      The concept is called "protocol encapsulation." As in H.323 videoconferencing protocol over HTTP. Since we also must do videoconferencing with our customers, we need a configuration that works over the Internet as well as the LAN, and our firewalls are configured such that HTTP is the viable solution.

      As for file transfers, HTTP-DAV is nice because it allows totally clueless end-users to post documents via the web browser, rather than use some other application to handle file transfer. Since they are already using the browser as the interface for just about everything else, allowing them to post documents via the browser reduces end-user training requirements.

      I'm not certain what you mean by using protocols that actually suit what I'm doing, as these two protocols (H.323, HTTP-DAV) are being used exactly as the designers intended.

    4. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by rbrander · · Score: 1
      Fascinating stuff. I don't think we're really arguing here - my original point was that not many of those shopping in a ZD publication for a web server have those kind of heavy needs. (I'd have had no problem if the review were headed "A comparison of big industrial-strength web servers"). It just annoys me to NOT see that qualification because it may cause every little Mom & Pop biz go out an buy Microsoft "because it was the Editor's Choice".

      Jumping topics now - to whether your problem should be running through generic web servers like IIS or Apache: Are there no server programs that specialize in HTTP-DAV and heavy-duty file transfer? If there were, you could hand off a URL to that server for that function, which is so different than "traditional" web-serving functions. I'm just leery of the idea of trying to make one program or one server do everything. Chalk it up to a career spent being anti-mainframe in a mainframe-oriented shop. Segregation of different functions onto different machines (or at least programs) is my "KISS" motto.

      Similarly, as to the videoconferencing - man, I'd spend a few minutes reconfiguring the firewall to allow a videoconferencing server through, rather than trying to do everything on Port 80 and HTTP.

      But, hey, assume I'm wrong and heavy applications like these become common for web servers - then a few years from now it won't be a few percent of Intranet servers that need this horsepower, it'll be over 20%, then 50% ... but let's see what Apache 2.2 is doing on multiple "Itanium" machines then!

    5. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by arc.light · · Score: 1

      Perhaps I should provide a few more details about our network, so I can justify the the design decisions that went into it.

      We have about 250GB - in about 200,000 files - available on four servers. At this point, having a cleverly designed directory structure is no longer a viable solution for organizing our documents across the enterprise, and an additional layer of abstraction is needed so users can locate the files they need.
      Enterprise Document Management Systems are applications that usually sit on top of an RDBMS and allow search, check-in check-out, version control, and other features beyond what a file server can do. Since we already have an Oracle ERP solution installed here, we went with their EDMS product, but there are certainly others available (most notably from Xerox and Eastman-Kodak, although recently I've wondered how suitable CVS would be for such a task).

      By the way, I think the biggest CAD file I found on our servers was ~400MB, and it was a Pro/Engineer drawing of a component that could fit in the palm of your hand. After a six-month campaign of trying to ration disk usage by our employees, only to be voted down by higher-ups, I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be adding disk storage to these servers forever. Network Appliance is starting to look real good...

    6. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by arc.light · · Score: 1

      (Sliding even further off-topic)
      I certainly understand your apprehension at putting all functions on one box... when I first started working for my employer about two years ago (then as a consultant) it was a 100% Microsoft shop with everything running on three NT servers cobbled together from parts someone probably bought at Fry's.

      I've finally managed to offload some core network functions to Solaris and BSD boxes, and got rid of that awful MS-Proxy Server, but it looks like NT is here to stay for inhouse messaging and such. At least the NT boxes are on better hardware now.

      As far as configuring the firewalls go, well, our super-spooky network security guru has developed a model of "ultra-paranoid double redundancy" which makes changes unsanctioned by him impossible, so port 80 it is.

    7. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by rbrander · · Score: 1
      Holy cow.

      That's as about as industrial-strength as it gets. Whatever tames that monster - giant web servers included - you certainly have every reason to turn to.

      So, tell me, when your problems are that big and your hardware spending on network and disk and specialty software (ERP,EDMS..) is proportionate - do you use Ziff-Davis articles as a shopping tool, or do you just get demo versions and do your own benchmarks that meet your needs, hire consultants to advise you on current products, and so on?

      We used to use magazines like PC Mag when we were picking Excel over 123 for 500 PCs, but now for our enterprise solutions I don't think they're even used to select a shortlist.

    8. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by BJH · · Score: 2

      I know about H.323, but AFAIK the H.323 standard talks mainly about transmission over LANs and specifies nothing about encapsulating it with HTTP, so your last statement doesn't really mean much, does it? It's like saying, "A firehose is designed to carry water, so there's nothing wrong with encasing it in a garden hose." I mean, that's gotta kill your bandwidth.

      My point (which applies to HTTP-DAV as well) is that most people would be better off using a server and protocol that are designed for the way they're going to use it, rather than trying to stick a square peg in a round hole. Just because your users are too braindead to use ftp/ncftp/WsFTP/CuteFTP/Fetch for file transfers, don't try and convince others that your solution is the best and web servers should be made to handle it.

    9. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by arc.light · · Score: 1

      True, but I referring to changes made through "official" channels.

    10. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by arc.light · · Score: 1

      Well, I sure don't use ZD articles as a shopping tool. When I am looking for solutions for uncommon problems, I often ask my friends at the consulting firm where I used to work what has worked for them. I also ask my hardware vendors for advice, but that has to be taken with a grain of salt since they're usually just trying to sell the most expensive solution. I also use AltaVista to search for text strings like "enterprise document management" or "PDF automation". Sure, I have to put up with "2,102,893 matches found, displaying results 1 - 10", but I find some pretty off-the-wall stuff that way

      For more mundance solutions, I usually stick with what I know works. I'm a little surprised that HP didn't send me a Christmas card this year, as we buy a whole lot of their products. All the Intel-based servers are HP NetServers, the workstations are HP Kayaks, and the low-end clients are *cheap* and reliable HP Vectras. It doesn't hurt that the CEO and COO are both technophiles, and have realized the productivity gains of their employees as our IT infrastructure has grown.

      One of the reasons I've pushed to make everything web-based is to create some level of platform independence. We have a huge number of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on our network, so for the time being everyone needs MS-Office, and thus, Windows, but at least there are packages out there with import/export tools for MS-Office, such as StarOffice and ApplixWare. What is more insidious are the client/server applications that will probably never get ported outside of Windows. By pushing the web-centric option, we leave open the possibility of making an alternative OS the primary desktop.

      The engineers will probably never be able to leave NT, as AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and Pro/Engineer would all have to offer UNIX versions of their product to make that switch, but virtually everyone else in the company could someday be moved.

    11. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by arc.light · · Score: 1

      Maybe you should find someone who will be able to setup things in your company properly then!?

      Thanks for the suggestion, AC! I'll bring this up at our next staff meeting. Neither I nor the end-users were aware that the network was malfunctioning, as our applications deceptively behave as though nothing is wrong, but I'll forward your comments to them.

      If you kill your own bandwidth (be it Gigabit or whatever) by making 100gb downloads, don't blame web server for not 'serving' the requests

      Actually, our bandwidth isn't getting killed. We have an excess of it. Our end-users are happy.

      I appreciate your enthusiastic and - dare I say it - emotional response to my network's configuration, but I wasn't posting to point out some flaw or error that needs correcting. I was simply stating that web servers that are capable of dishing out content in excess of T3 speeds aren't as exotic as some people may think, since many web servers are used to deliver content over a LAN at Ethernet speeds.

      If the few posters who think I am insane or stupid because file transfers are generally done over HTTP in my network want to hear me admit that HTTP might not be the most efficient protocol for this kind of thing, so be it! HTTP is not a very bandwidth-efficient means of file transfer.

      However, the excess of bandwidth in our LAN means that we can afford to waste a little bandwidth. The LAN has been over-engineered with scalability in mind. Further, the nature of the clients' use of the network (i.e. as much as possible is done with the web browser) makes file transfer over HTTP the easiest way to do it.

    12. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by arc.light · · Score: 1

      Well, lack of bandwidth is not really an issue in our network. Further, I am not trying to convince anyone that what I am doing in my environment would work best for them. I am simply stating that it works for us.

      Running H.323 over HTTP isn't a decision that we made because we were trying to preserve bandwidth. It was a compromise to allow videoconferencing through our firewall. Maintaining two different configuration settings for the client program (one for Internet, one for LAN) would probably cause additional helpdesk calls, so we chose a one-size-fits-all approach. No one on our LAN is complaining about a slow network.

      Further, we chose to use HTTP-DAV because is integrates well with our vision of having a web-based information resource for the company. The end-users are familiar with the point-and-click interface, and they don't have to learn any cryptic commands or switch amongst different apps to do their jobs. We do not expect our accountants, receptionists, machinists, and salespersons to become computer power users when there is an easier way for them to access the information they need to do their work.

      If we have to sacrifice some bandwidth to make this happen, so what? I'm probably using the wrong octane-level of gas in my car, but my mechanic doesn't flame me for it.

    13. Re:Umm. Remove head from defilade position? by BJH · · Score: 2

      Certainly, you're free to use the solution that suits your users, but saying things like:

      If we have to sacrifice some bandwidth to make this happen, so what?

      isn't going to make you many friends among most IT departments; not everyone runs Gigabit Ethernet (hell, the company I used to work at was using plain old 10Mb Ethernet for more than 350 clients (SMB, IPX, Ethertalk, TCP/IP) - without subnets or any other way of limiting broadcast traffic).

  72. Re:They forgot some [nope] by IntlHarvester · · Score: 1

    Mac OS X is based on BSD (and basically the same as any BSD)

    Not entirely true. MacOS X is based on a Mach microkernel, which is entirely different that the classic-style Unix kernels used by the BSDs. This is going to give it very different performance characteristics as a web server than any BSD.

    The *BSD stuff is in there to provide Unix compatiblity in the user space (to run Apache with, for instance.) From what I've heard, the "Yellow Box" GUI environment sits directly on Mach, and the whole BSD bit will probably be an optional install on OS X Client.
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    Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
  73. Christ... by punkass · · Score: 1

    ...please say that post was a joke.

    --
    "Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
  74. Re:ZDnet's X10 pr0n ad by arielb · · Score: 1

    yes those ads are definitely sexist-I mean what does pictures of women have to do with their product? They are just using them as sex objects

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  75. Re:you bunch of woosies by BJH · · Score: 2


    I believe that's spelled "woozy" ;)

  76. Ebay, An excelent example Stability by Little+Brother · · Score: 1

    Did anyone else notice that when the Windows NT review was talking about stability in Windows NT, it mentioned major sites that use NT, including Ebay?

    Does everyone else think that is a pretty good example? Ebay is great, but as an example of stability, I'd prefer an airplane with one wing split in half. Or is that just me?

    Also, does Ebay even use SSL? I notice that the benchmarks do not neccicarly compare to the examples used in the review.

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    Little Brother, watching the watchers

  77. NT doesn't give you MT-ed asnch I/O for free by Malc · · Score: 1

    "A complement to threading in Windows NT is its ability to achieve asynchronous I/O. Asynchronous I/O lets a threaded Web server process requests at the same time it performs file or network I/O. Without this capability, the Web server would sit and wait while the disk subsystem pulled a file from the hard disk or passed the requested file to the network. Instead, the server can work simultaneously on requests from other clients while the I/O subsystem handles the file or network I/O. A similar feature is available in Solaris but has yet to be fully implemented in Linux."

    What a load of bollocks. Let's get the facts straight. Any IIS development where a request takes more than a fraction of a second forces the ISAPI extension developer to spawn their own thread and implement the request asynchronously themeselves. Why? Because IIS has a limited number of threads in its pool and when they are all used clients start receiving "Server Busy" messages.

    In my experience developing for IIS, if you want asynchronous disk I/O and asynch network I/O, you have to do it all yourself. This is not a standard feature of NT by a long shot. Writing your own multithreaded code adds considerable time to development. It's not necessarily trivial, especially if you have to debug due to race conditions (which might not even show up for a long time). Spawning a thread is easy enough, but ensuring that everything is thread safe and correctly synchronised could be turn out to be time consuming if you make just one simple mistake. These fools at ZDNet make it sound so trivial and simple: they obviously don't understand what they're talking about. A complex multi-threaded system that has been badly designed and implemented is a nightmare, especially if you have a large number of developers working on it (in my experience, the majority of software engineers out there just cannot develop safe multi-threaded code).

  78. Ho hum, move along, nothing to see here... by Jeff+Licquia · · Score: 1

    Not just benchmarketing, but stale benchmarketing!

    • They reviewed Caldera 1.3, when 2.2 was out. 2.0.35 kernel, older Apache, libc5. Oh, and the "Win95 bug" crap was lame; Caldera should have had an update out, and if they didn't, how hard would it have been to switch to Red Hat? I'm sure that they had at least Service Pack 3 on that NT box.
    • NS and MS support "dynamic server APIs", while Apache only has an "extension module API". Difference? Both use C, both produce DLLs (or shared libraries under Unixlike OSes) that link directly into the Web server, both have security problems, both are fast as the dickens. Oh, yeah, I forgot: the makers of Apache are honest about the API's usefulness. If ZD Labs wants real credibility, they need to include some Apache API code along with the NSAPI and ISAPI crap, or drop it entirely and use the dynamic environments we really use. Wouldn't it be nice to see performance evaluations of ASP vs. mod_perl, for example?

    There's likely to be some good data buried in there somewhere. But, for once, it would be nice for a benchmark crew to actually provide some honest results, so we don't have to sift through the wreckage for trinkets of relevance.

  79. Welcome to Mars... by leonbrooks · · Score: 1

    With hundreds of third-party products plugging into IIS, you could theoretically replace Windows components at almost any level. For example, you could bypass COM for some purposes and implement a third-party CORBA broker to talk to external systems. This versatility lets you opt for Windows NT as your Web platform without locking you into a Microsoft-only solution.

    "And you, Mr Reviewer, are addressing us from the surface of which planet?" He who pays the piper calls the tunes; this has two implications here: at the presentation level (1) this particular piper is being paid by...? and at the content level (2) you'll find out just how MS-independent you are when you install Service Pack 6, and suddenly discover why SP6a (-: God forbid that they should call it "SP7"! :-) was quietly released.

    I think the first component to replace would be the entire web service (with Apache, much less prone to running the command of your choice than IIS), and the second would be the entire OS (with almost any Unix-ish). Then you could safely say "I am not locked into a Microsoft-only solution" without me laughing long and loud at you.

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    Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
  80. Re:Not too bright are you lads? by Graymalkin · · Score: 2

    For some reason I thought it had always been spelled admission.

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    I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  81. Re:Why don't they test REAL arch's ??? by Graymalkin · · Score: 2

    You're insulting him for being correct? Doesn't that make you an "utter complete moron". Ebay's backend uses Solaris with an Oracle database, their front end servers use NT. The frontend does a tenth of the work the backend does.

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    I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  82. Re:Why don't they test REAL arch's ??? by Graymalkin · · Score: 2

    You have to remember though that M$'s site runs on a cluster on 96 Compaq Proliants running NT. Hotmail uses about as many as that.

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    I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  83. Re:you bunch of woosies by supersnail · · Score: 1

    wos = Waste Of Space.

    Therefore I think wosies would be the correct spelling.

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    Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
  84. Mindcraft versus Consumer Reports by richard_willey · · Score: 1

    Earlier this month, there was a Slashdot article which mentioned that consumer reports was been sued by Suzuki. I don't have all the details on the lawsuit, but Suzuki is claiming that Consumer Reports subjected the Suzuki Sidekick to a biased test which was specifically designed such that the Sidekick would fail.

    I think that this case might have some extremely interesting legs. Most of us who work in the industry are well aware that there are testing houses that can be relied on to bias there testing processes. This is by no means restricted to the high tech industry (ever wonder about some of those "quotes" that movie advertizements include? What about the unbiased research conducted by the Tobacco Institute or some of the more interested funded research into global warming these days)

    If Suzuki is able to successful sue Consumer Reports, this might set a very interesting precedent that could be extended to other potentially biased studies and reports.

    Please note, I don't think that there is necessarily anything wrong with presenting a strong arguement in favor of a particular point of view. In my mind, the probalem comes about when individual bodies are supposedly acting as dispassionate observers when, in fact, they clearly have an institutional bias.

    Richard

  85. Re:Discuss why Linux didn't do as well as you hope by burgeltz · · Score: 1

    What about reliability? The ZDNet test misses the whole issue.

    Most servers are never going to get the waves of traffic you see at the high end of their testing scale. But any Web server, no matter what its traffic, has to stay up.

    That's where NT falls on its face. NT servers go down about once a week; Linux boxes can go for 2 months or more without a reboot.

    This review is old, but it's missinformation still lingers.

  86. Re:you bunch of woosies by BJH · · Score: 1


    I was actually referring to the adjective "woozy", as in dizzy, rather than the noun "wussie"/"woosie"/"woosy", which means that you get sand kicked in your face regularly ;)

  87. Re:Discuss why Linux didn't do as well as you hope by hey! · · Score: 2

    Hi Ed.

    ZDNet chose to tune ALL the servers to have 68Mb of web source material and at least 68Mb of memory disk cache.
    Why did this give NT an unfair advantage? Why does Linux (or particularly the Caldera distro) solution not deal with RAM-rich servers as well as NT?

    Well, I don't think you have it quite right. It is not that they are exposing a Linux weakness in handling RAM rich servers, it is that they are hiding a major performance bottleneck of NT -- its file system.

    On the other hand, you get something for your performance hit -- filesystem journaling. It will be interesting to see what happens when ext3 and Reiser FS become more common.

    In any case, I run a small web site that is 160MB in size, not counting databases. This is too large to be cached in the setup described, although not unreasonable to be entirely cached. However, if I was doing serious corporate intranet or a major ecommerce site, I would expect it to be much, much larger.

    I am not a conspiracy theorist, but does it not seem a tad unrealistic to devise a web benchmark test which totally discounts disk access?

    All religious handwaving aside, why did NT fare better by spinning threads than Apache could do by spinning processes? What is the big bottleneck in managing a process, that managing a thread doesn't have? They were using a brand-new MP kernel straight from Linus. Will the Linux kernel mature to deal with SMP situations and massive numbers of similar threads or processes better?

    Well, on Unix, forking is cheap -- very cheap. On Windows, launching a new application instance is very expensive. Therefore multithreading is a huge performance win -- multiprocessor or no -- on windows, but a relatively smaller one on Unix. If you think about it, it hardly seems worth multithreading unless the threads are updating some common memory. If you write a thread with no critical sections, it may as well be a process on Unix, but on Windows it benefits from getting access to memory pages that have to be laboriously set up (they are simply copied in a Unix fork).

    I am guessing that multithreading Apache speed improvements in Unix will scarcely be measurable unless nearly all the data being served out is cached in memory.

    ZDNet suggested that in-process programming worked better for all the hairy e-commerce they decided to test.
    ... they have a point.

    Well, that is a matter of opinion. Ebay may use IIS, but they do everything through CGIs.


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    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  88. Enough complaining... by joealba · · Score: 1

    Let's do something about this!

    Can we organize our own unbiased testing, disclosing hardware, OS, all configuration tweaks, patches, etc. and come up with a standard testing method that's doable with reasonably available hardware (that people have available at home or work)? Between all of us loyal readers, I'm sure we've got access to just about any configuration possible.

    I'm not looking to determine which config can serve up 1 billion hits per second and 2 terabytes per minute here.. Let's just see where the loads/cpu times start to peak out, if we can establish that.

    We all know the costs of most of the hardware and software, so we can make our own cost comparisons. I'm just really interested to see how the different platforms stack up. So far I'm really happy with our UltraSparc Solaris running NES, but I'd prefer Linux/Apache for development. I'd like to see some numbers on this, and I'd like to help generate them.


    Slashdot isn't just a collection of links with funny polls.. The reader base is far too well educated and experienced for that. Let's get something accomplished!

    Anyone have input on this, or am I asking too much?