Web Server Comparisons

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 Check it out at their web site"My fault - this is totally out of date.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.

Comments

Hemos - read the dateline

[father_guido]

May 6 1999? That's today?

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

;)

nope...

[Issue9mm]

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...

Anyone else notice the cache comment?

[color of static]

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.

Re:Old stuff; any new developments?

[orcrist]

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