Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Dynamic pages and IIS

Author:David Rothgery
Posted:7/2/1999; 4:02:43 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 7/2/99
Msg #:8094 (In response to 8046)
Prev/Next:8093 / 8095

PC Magazine ran a comparison test in May which didn't get much publicity -- mostly because it was a pain to find on pcmag.com, and the navigation within the article is a bit confusing. Anyway, they did publish two dynamic web site tests. Begining of PC Magazine Server Tests.

Disclaimer1: The only web sites I have anything to do with maintaining are very small and exceedingly low-traffic (since one of them belongs to the company I work for, I'm trying to change the last bit). Both are remotely hosted. I have no idea how accurately anybody's benchmarks, especially those designed for large web sites, reflect the real world.

Disclaimer2: PC Magazine ran these tests before all the issues with the most recent Linux kernel update (which added multiprocessor support) had been worked out, and so reverted to an earlier kernel version. The dual-CPU, high-memory (512MB) server configuration they used is quite favorable to NT.

Disclaimer3: As near as I can tell, the comparisons were built using what PC Magazine considered the 'most common' technologies, rather than the fastest. And they didn't provide too much detail in how they ran the tests.

As you can probably tell from all the disclaimers, IIS/NT rather handily trounced all the other servers they tested against in dynamic page serving. Interestingly enough, Sun's Sun Web Server/Solaris actually outdid IIS/NT on static page serving under extreme high traffic.

A side note here is that the cost of one dual-CPU web server (even with NT) is probably about the same as paying one good web developer for one month. So reducing development time may improve price/performance as much or more than buying cheaper servers or software.

Still, I wouldn't be surprised if Win2K Server is significantly cheaper than NT4 Server, or users of major commercial Linux distributions (particularly Caldera, Red Hat, and VA) become eligible for 'competitive upgrade' pricing.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:51:12 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.