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hß · Linux & UnixCurated

Linux and Windows level as web servers

Summary

A c’t test in August 2000 showed that Linux had caught up with Windows 2000 as a web server, after Apache on Linux had still been inferior on multiprocessor systems a year earlier. Both delivered more static pages than the network could transport; with dynamic pages using PHP or ASP, both scaled almost linearly up to four CPUs. Outside the competition, the unreleased kernel web server TUX beat both IIS and Apache.

Ideas

  • Revisions in the Linux kernel made multiprocessor web servers competitive.
  • With static pages, the network is the limit, not the server.
  • The real load comes from generating dynamic pages from databases.
  • Four CPUs delivered about three times the performance of one CPU.

Insights

  • Benchmarks with static pages say little about real web applications.
  • More processors are only worthwhile as long as price and scaling fit together.

Facts

  • Relative to their price, eight-way systems performed considerably worse than four-way systems.
  • TUX had set a record in the SPECweb99 benchmark in July 2000.

References

Critique

  • The comparison measures throughput, but makes no statements about stability, security or administrative effort.

Remarks

  • TUX came from Red Hat and was never included in the official Linux kernel; web servers in the kernel did not catch on.

Recommendations

  • Test web servers with realistic dynamic requests rather than only with static files.
  • Before buying larger machines, check whether several smaller servers scale more cheaply.

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