Rob, this is fantastic. I'm dead impressed. A useful portal!
I can't believe I'm admitting to this in public, but I've selected Jennicam and it doesn't seem to update.
Yes, I've set my browser (N4.07) to validate the page each time, and the main page updates fine, just not the JenniJPG.
If you modified that code so it piped the image through a script you could knock out an HTTP header, maybe Pragma: no cache or maybe an expires 2 minutes in the future (remember not everyone lives in EST though!). Of course, you'd want to proxy-cache the image on your side, and this would mean you were using/. bandwidth not hers, but that's only fair.
I understand if you don't want to do this, but I wanted to draw it to your (team's, I hope) attention.
IIS on NT can be faster than Apache on *nix under certain unrealistic circumstances, but not under anything you'd call "realistic conditions".
With a fairly high-powered box (dual P-Pro and up) that is not heavily loaded, that only servers static files and never CGIs, database lookups, SSIs or any other dynamic content then yes, IIS is a bit faster. But as Apache Performance Tuning says,
Most sites have less than 10Mbits of outgoing bandwidth, which Apache can fill using only a low end Pentium-based webserver. In practice sites with more bandwidth require more than one machine to fill the bandwidth due to other constraints (such as CGI or database transaction overhead).
If you add anything like CGI, mod_perl, PHP, SSI or whatever, Apache quickly takes the lead. I can offer a rough performance comparison between Apache + PHP + MySQL on FreeBSD and IIS + Cold Fusion + Access on WinNT. The former was maxing out a K6/2-350 with 256Mb RAM at 200,000 page views per day. The latter was maxing out identical hardware at under 5,000 page views per day. Admittedly they weren't identical sites (actually the Apache site had much more complex db work). More importantly, to compare IIS with Apache accurately we should have had them both connecting to a database on a separate machine (and not use Access!), but nonetheless it makes clear that the IIS on NT option is technically less preferable.
This article is important not because it shows Linux beating NT but because it compares competing OSS. For ZD and other commercial magazines to survive they must have competing products to review. If they are ever going to support OSS they too need a way to make money off it. Comparing different OSS products (Redhat versus Caldera, Sendmail versus Exim, or even Apache built with GCC versus Apache built with PGCC) is the way ZD can profit from OSS. And guess what, if they benchmark properly they'd actually be doing something useful.
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Rob, this is fantastic. I'm dead impressed. A useful portal!
/. bandwidth not hers, but that's only fair.
I can't believe I'm admitting to this in public, but I've selected Jennicam and it doesn't seem to update.
Yes, I've set my browser (N4.07) to validate the page each time, and the main page updates fine, just not the JenniJPG.
If you modified that code so it piped the image through a script you could knock out an HTTP header, maybe Pragma: no cache or maybe an expires 2 minutes in the future (remember not everyone lives in EST though!). Of course, you'd want to proxy-cache the image on your side, and this would mean you were using
I understand if you don't want to do this, but I wanted to draw it to your (team's, I hope) attention.
IIS on NT can be faster than Apache on *nix under certain unrealistic circumstances, but not under anything you'd call "realistic conditions".
With a fairly high-powered box (dual P-Pro and up) that is not heavily loaded, that only servers static files and never CGIs, database lookups, SSIs or any other dynamic content then yes, IIS is a bit faster. But as Apache Performance Tuning says,
If you add anything like CGI, mod_perl, PHP, SSI or whatever, Apache quickly takes the lead. I can offer a rough performance comparison between Apache + PHP + MySQL on FreeBSD and IIS + Cold Fusion + Access on WinNT. The former was maxing out a K6/2-350 with 256Mb RAM at 200,000 page views per day. The latter was maxing out identical hardware at under 5,000 page views per day. Admittedly they weren't identical sites (actually the Apache site had much more complex db work). More importantly, to compare IIS with Apache accurately we should have had them both connecting to a database on a separate machine (and not use Access!), but nonetheless it makes clear that the IIS on NT option is technically less preferable.
This article is important not because it shows
Linux beating NT but because it compares competing
OSS. For ZD and other commercial magazines to
survive they must have competing products to review. If they are ever going to support OSS
they too need a way to make money off it. Comparing different OSS products (Redhat versus Caldera, Sendmail versus Exim, or even Apache built with GCC versus Apache built with PGCC) is the way ZD can profit from OSS.
And guess what, if they benchmark properly they'd actually be doing something useful.