Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: PC Week Linux/NT tests.
Author: Eric J. Bowersox Posted: 6/25/1999; 3:54:29 PM Topic: PC Week Linux/NT tests. Msg #: 7827 (In response to 7826) Prev/Next: 7826 / 7828
That's probably because this test was the closest thing to a fair comparison of performance between Linux and NT that we are ever likely to see.Ultimately, everyone is made to feel like a winner. Mindcraft is somewhat vindicated, because a performance differential does exist (just not as dramatic as they thought). Microsoft gets a performance comparison they can be proud of, and there is no doubt that they will be trumpeting this as loud as they can. And the Linux kernel hackers (not to mention the Apache and Samba teams) got professional assistance in the identification of performance bottlenecks in their code, paid for by Ziff-Davis.
It will be interesting to see if they revisit this in a year, pitting Linux kernel 2.4 against Windows 2000. (Of course, this depends on whether Microsoft is willing...and they may be less willing, if Win2K turns out to be as big a dog as some people claim it will be, while Linux makes great performance strides in the 2.3 kernel series.)
Besides, many of the reasons for choosing Linux have nothing to do with performance. Note that this test makes no mention of stability, remote management, price/performance ratio, or the freedom to look at and tinker with the system source yourself. And, quite frankly, for some environments, the kind of big quad-processor box they used for these benchmarks is overkill. I daresay that a great many of the systems that are currently running Linux and unobtrusively doing their jobs would not even run NT, and might even be sluggish running Win95.
There have been many calls for a reasoned response already..."don't rush to the barricades to flame Microsoft, rush to the 2.3 kernel sources and start fixing the performance issues." In the long run, this is a better strategy.
Sure, Microsoft won. Fair and square.
*This* time :-).
Eric
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