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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.vbc.net!alpha.sky.net!newshub.csu.net!csulb.edu!news.sgi.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!uwm.edu!news.cse.psu.edu!news.ecn.bgu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news.indiana.edu!indyvax.iupui.edu!mwood From: mwood@indyvax.iupui.edu (Mark H. Wood) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.misc Subject: Re: Unix too slow for a Web server? Message-ID: <1996Sep21.083306.26626@indyvax.iupui.edu> Date: 21 Sep 96 08:33:06 -0500 References: <323ED0BD.222CA97F@pobox.com> Lines: 28 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:130576 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:27672 comp.infosystems.www.misc:43888 In article <323ED0BD.222CA97F@pobox.com>, Subhas Roy <subhas@pobox.com> writes: > A ZDnet article says in the web page > http://www.zdnet.com/pccomp/features/fea1096/sub4.html#jump2 > that Windows NT-based servers run much faster (as much as 13 > times) when client counts are low. > > Is that possible? Anybody wants to comment on the > article's claim? Where to begin? 1) Something Else must be going on. This is the same sort of jive that Unix vendors used to pull on other OSes. The CPU clock doesn't tick faster just because you have one OS or another. Of course Unix had that big I/O block cache, and the others didn't (then). 2) Is the difference really significant? If one server responds in 13 nanoseconds and another in only one, do humans (who respond in seconds to milliseconds) really care? 3) How do the results scale with load? I mean, do we really care about unloaded performance? Most people are more interested in how response varies when load nears capacity (and it seems that Web servers are *always* running near or over capacity!)-: . -- Mark H. Wood, Lead Systems Programmer +1 317 274 0749 [@disclaimer@] Internet: MWOOD@INDYVAX.IUPUI.EDU BITNET: MWOOD@INDYVAX Trapped in a world he never made.