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OSS Web Stacks Outperformed by .Net?
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jul 11, 2006 10:40 AM
from the sad-penguin dept.
from the sad-penguin dept.
Gimble writes "eWeek has an article up that looks at the performance of portals using open source stacks and comparing them to their MS equivalents. The article's conclusion is that .Net outperforms the open source stacks, mainly because of its tighter integration, but also notes that running the open source stacks on Windows (WAMP) delivered strong performance." From the article: "Based on our forays into user forums for many top open-source enterprise applications, there are many IT managers attempting to run open-source products on Windows servers--attracted, no doubt, to the benefits and efficiencies of using open source without having to become Linux administrators. The results of our WAMP stack tests indicate that these folks might be on to something."
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Left out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Left out? (Score:5, Interesting)
They seem to have a generalized poverty of data. Their charts seem absurd to the point of being straw men. I mean, come on - I don't think there's anything seriously wrong enough with Linux that WAMP would have a score of 12 transactions/sec, competing with Windows, whereas LAMP would have a performance of 2. My experience with Windows vs. Linux has always been that they are similar in terms of speed from pure processing tasks to 3d games. Sometimes Windows does a little better, sometimes Linux is better. But they're usually in the same ballpark. The numbers are just too neat. It's like they put up a chart saying that Republicans, Germans, Koreans and Canadians have sex once a month, whereas Democrats, Brazilians, and the British have sex five million times per second.
Moreover, the whole rest of the article is morass of poetic circumlocution. My gut feeling as somebody who works with words a lot is that they're trying to obfuscate something with a giant wall of banal text. I don't know exactly what that is, because I don't feel like reading all of it, but if I had to guess I'd say that the real thing to take away from this article is that anybody can set up .NET and a Windows box, but that it requires a little bit of patience and research to make Linux work properly - research that these people were not willing to do.
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Re:Short memories (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but with modern windows, what exactly is missing that dis-qualifies it from being a real multi-user OS? And FWIW, I've found VS2005 to be much better than any development studio I've tried for linux.
If you buy Windows to run AMP servers
So you think its better to have servers which don't integrate with your corporate network? $400 for Web edition isn't a whole lot to anyone running web farms.
Linux and BSD are more efficient to work with in server contexts
Your opinion, there's no fact to that. I replace my linux server at home with SBS 2003 because its easier to manage the network using SBS2003 than it was with Linux + SMB.
work better with 64-bit processors [Win64 is a huge compatibility joke atm]
I've heard quite differently; indeed, some people claim XP64 is the best desktop OS, even better than 32bit XP. I don't think the 64 bit servers are suffering huge problems either.
don't require you to call India each time your HD breaks and you need a re-install.
A bunch of FUD here; mearly replacing an HD doesn't require calling anyone, and alot of shops image the drives every night so that if there is a failure, they slap on the saved image and are up and running again in no time.
Heck, in BSD/Linux doing a ghost of your system is as simple as burning a tarball to a DVD.
You can easily save an image of a Windows installtion as well.
No need for 3rd party ghosting tools and praying that Windows lets you "get away with" using your OS...
Go ahead and spend hours and hours tarballing your server; the fact is that it would be faster to just create an image of the HD and burn that to a DVD. There's no praying involved; my former employer had great success doing such restores. And putting down a new image is faster than un-tarring a file to disk again.
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Re:Short memories (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the grandparents point is that though it is technically a multi-user OS, it isn't a very good one. The kernel level schedulers on Windows give a really poor response under multiple sources of medium to heavy load.
I'm not aware of that many "development studios" for Unix. There's a couple, like eclipse and such, but many Unix writers tend to work a different way. In line with the Unix philosophy (rules 1, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 if you're interested) there's a lot of people who keep the editor, compiler, linker etc all seperate. If you're looking for a "development studio" for Unix, I think you're looking for the wrong thing. We don't have a Start Menu either.
So you think its better to have servers which don't integrate with your corporate network? $400 for Web edition isn't a whole lot to anyone running web farms.
Well, I'm sure anyone could have pointed out that large companies with large budgets can afford the $400 dollar cost. But that $400 dollars is a cost, and to a lot of companies, it's a big cost. It's an even bigger cost when many difference licences have to be purchased. (Obviously, Unixes have costs of their own, but the costs tend to increase in line with the use being made, or the complexity of the "solution" etc, and up-front licences payments (which are immoral, in my opinion) normally end up being a far less weildy solution than Free Unix is) And in my, and the grandparents opinion, it's an unjustified cost.
Your opinion, there's no fact to that. I replace my linux server at home with SBS 2003 because its easier to manage the network using SBS2003 than it was with Linux + SMB.
Of course it's opinion! The whole damn subject is opinion! As if a (very very poorly run) test on the speed of a server is the last word on the subject! There's little universal fact to your personal experience either.
I've heard quite differently; indeed, some people claim XP64 is the best desktop OS, even better than 32bit XP. I don't think the 64 bit servers are suffering huge problems either.
Have you actually used it? WinXP 64bit really doesn't work very well at all. I wouldn't know about 64 bit servers, but 64 bit WinXP is really not something that works very well.
Go ahead and spend hours and hours tarballing your server; the fact is that it would be faster to just create an image of the HD and burn that to a DVD. There's no praying involved; my former employer had great success doing such restores. And putting down a new image is faster than un-tarring a file to disk again.
It's possible to use either image or tar with Unixes. Tar is useful because it's easy to use diffs and delta compression on backups then. Tar's also useful when you only want to backup a certain area; such as
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WAMP vs LAMP (Score:5, Informative)
I would very much like it if I could continue using Windows (because I run other programs that are not available on Linux) but it can't match the simplicity of Ubuntu.
I'm going to have to use the /. rule of thumb (Score:5, Funny)
If M$ wins, its fud and was paid for.
If apple wins, its because of Steve Jobs.
If OS/2 wins, we're trapped in a parallel universe.
Re:I'm going to have to use the /. rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Justified perhaps, but automatically accurate... not necessarily.
Ok, fanboy.
So when MS doesn't add new features they are slammed for not innovating enough, and when they do add new features they are slammed for contributing to bloat that you don't want. People bitched about IE6 not having tabs, etc. Firefox came out and MS finally realized it had to update IE so it added a lot of features people were asking for and the most-heard comment on Slashdot after IE7b2 was released was "it's ugly". Face it: Microsoft just can't win.
You sorta' answered yourself there.
Not every product is a winner. MS historically doesn't release every single product as a beta and quietly stop promoting the ones that suck. Instead they release final versions and some fall on their face. No company has a perfect record.
The problem is not that criticism isn't warranted, it's that MS can't win no matter what. If they release a weak or buggy product they get slammed, but if they take too long to release they get slammed. If they don't add new features they get slammed, but if they add new features it's called bloat. If an MS product gets bad reviews the reviewers are being honest, but if they get good reviews the reviewers are obviously being paid. For years MS got slammed for security issues, and they beefed up SP2 and suddenly there were waves of "but it broke my application" complaints. The list goes on.
Microsoft has gotten so big that they are in the impossible position of trying to keep everyone happy. I'm not particularly a Microsoft "fan", but I hate this wanton "Micro$oft is teh suxors!1!" b.s. OSS fanboys need to grow up and realize that Microsoft can't go back in time and correct the sins of the past, and since it is a monopoly it can't just genuinely screw its customers and break every file/application by releasing a new version of Windows that corrects all the problems of the old versions but offers no legacy support. They have a tough balancing act to do and, while they're not perfect, they're getting better.
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Hits per second ~20 ?? (Score:3, Funny)
Running a web server over an RF port from the wrist watch to a phone scewed the results a bit, but its the only communication mode they had.
The smartphone was the only client they had handy to test with, since the test was carried out on a long flight.
Amazing stuff!
Worst... Benchmark.... Ever... (Score:5, Insightful)
For the
Not to mention the fact that using a portal application in your tests means that there is really very little way to isolate if it was a poorly written portal application or a crappy framework that the portal application was built on that's causing perf issues.
It is very difficult to test framework vs framework, but this is just about the worst way one could even attempt it.
At absolute best, this compares portal frameworks on various platforms. Even if they were trying to do that, they did a piss poor job.
MindCraft would be the "worst" so far. (Score:5, Interesting)
#1. NO tuning was done on the LAMP stuff. None at all. They ran the stuff "out of the box".
#2. They didn't write their own app. That means they didn't test the SAME processes on each system.
#3. They didn't bother to find WHERE the differences were. Is it in the IP stack? Is it in the OS? Is it in the scripting language? Is it in the app?
How bad can "research" be and still be published in "eWeek"? There wasn't any research done for that article.
Microsoft has, in the past, taken various short-cuts when IIS was the server and IE was the browser. Is that the case in this "study"? Are the other "stacks" "slower" because they follow the protocols?
You won't know because they'd didn't LOOK for the REASON behind their "results".
At least MindCraft was paid to do poor research.
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If I may expand upon your post ... (Score:5, Interesting)
#1. Set a price limit. You can set multiple limits ($1,000 vs $5,000 vs $25,000 vs $100,000 vs $1,000,000+). The key concept here is that you get different characteristics as your budget increases/decreases. What characteristics does each "stack" offer in each price range? Yep, this does give the advantage to Free stacks (Free like speech, free like beer). Deal with it. In the Real World the bottom line is the bottom line. Each team gets to spend the money however they want to.
#2. Get the "experts" to tune each stack. BUT they must document each modification they make, including WHY they made that modification (what testing did they run and how did those test results tell them what mod's to make) AND they are only allowed to make mod's that can be found via public websites (no secret tuning parameters that are only known to the organization writing that software) AND they aren't allowed to touch any source code. They get what everyone else gets.
#3. The fun part. Each team gets to pull apart the work of the other teams. Even if your solution is faster for the specs given, how much wiggle room do you have? Is faster and fragile better than slower and stable? How much "slower" is acceptable for how much more "stable"? Can the other team defeat your security (network access only)?
#4. Freeze those systems. Then, over the next year, patch them and re-test them. Do the patches break the "tuning" that was done?
Now that would be an informative test process (and would result in lots of articles and interviews for the magazine publishing it).
Yeah, you can run Linux / Apache / MySQL / perl on a single drive workstation and get damn good performance for less than $300.
But that will be completely different from Oracle / Java on a cluster of Suns costing $10,000,000. And not just in the number of boxes you'd be running.
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Test components too variable (Score:5, Insightful)
How is the statement that
ASP.Net is pretty nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
"performance"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy Throughput! (Score:5, Funny)
*No math was done to come up with the 17MB figure.
Also, no animals were harmed during the writing of this comment.
The article is NOT that conclusive (Score:5, Informative)
* - I've seen similar results in benchmarks of Mono &
Too bad the article haven't touched Mono.
No wonder Linux sucked! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, they ran an outward-facing Zope server (after being explicitly told not to) and the performace was lackluster? Go figure. In the real world, they'd run Zope behind an Apache or Squid proxy (as per every installation recommendation I've ever seen) which would immediately boost throughput by an order of magnitude. In short, using Zope to dynamically generate static content instead of caching the results whenever possible is insane, and pretty much no one does it. They also apparently forgot about ZEO, although I'm not sure how you can be savvy enough to get Zope up and populated without knowing about it's built-in clustering.
Apparently they had no interest in any tuning whatsoever, to the point of de-tuning it by installing it in an explicitly unrecommended configuring. And then it lost. Go figure.
All well and good but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows Servers/App languages doesn't seem to scale well. It's a *great* way to get your business up and running asap. But you run into growth problems and need to switch to an enterprise solution (oracle, as/400, java, linux, etc.) once you reach a certain size. I still prefer windows as a desktop OS for now. I still slightly prefer windows office to openoffice. I think part of that is years of using office makes me comfortable but openoffice gets closer every day to replacing it for my home and personal use. I will probably not buy another version of office unless it is super cheap ($50/included free on the PC I buy).
It depends on configuration and how you measure it (Score:4, Insightful)
On equivalent hardware, with equivalent RAM, if you're running MySQL with the MyISAM engine it will blow away SQL Server performance for most queries, but at a cost: You do not have stored procedures or transactions. When you switch to InnoDB you gain those but take a performance hit and that advantage over SQL Server disappears. On the plus side, MySQL is free/free (unless you need the commercial license - which in turn depends on whether you bundle it with your application AND how you interface with MySQL AND the "license" of your software).
As far as
- What is the architecture and how efficient is the code? If you use, say, DotNetNuke as an example, it's a good argument AGAINST using
- How much RAM can you throw at it, and is caching appropriate for your application? With fully dynamic web sites where pages may display random content (rotating images, randomized quote of the day, etc.) unless you override the caching mechanism, the cache can effectively break your web site. However if caching IS appropriate and/or you override it when necessary,
- (related to above) are you comparing a poorly-coded, inefficient, beastly PHP application to a lightweight highly-optimized
What is my point? Unless you are comparing apples to apples, it's FUD or at best an amateur comparison. The way to test it is to implement the same task with a similar (as possible) architecture on each platform, with the application on each fully optimized, with both IIS and apache/tomcat/whatever fully tuned and streamlined to pull out every bit of performance from it, then load test both of those using the same sorts of tests. Comparing a highly-optimized single-purpose application to a general-purpose portal platform is not a fair test.
Also: Even though the article says "Even the most ardent PHP fans will admit that PHP is not designed with performance in mind," PHP performs damn well considering it's heritage, the fact that its primary platform is "a patchy server" and that it is FREE.
Why would one choose LAMP over
Pure and utter Bullsh*t. (Score:4, Insightful)
Zope is an object relational application server, making it slower than anything else running standard DB's. Technologically wise Zope is ten years ahead of Sharepoint - this is payed for with performance hoging and heavy-weight memory usage. 2Gigs is not enough for running Zope/Plone in a serious production enviroment.
Sharepoint is a monolithic built-to-fit solution that was grown over the course of almost a decade and finally has turned into something that doesn't crash every odd hour and - at last - performs the way it was supposed to back in 2001.
Keeping in mind that Zope was allready working back in 2001 and actually hasn't changed all that much since then. The entire redo - Zop 3.0 - still is in developement.
Sharepoint is usually used for CMS purposes, while Zope is usually used for highly abstracted business application developement.
Nobody in his right mind would get the idea to build an ERP system with Sharepoint.
Bottom line:
These guys didn't know what they where testing.
Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
To test the .Net stack, we ran Windows Server 2003 R2, SQL Server 2005 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Across the board, this configuration performed very well, with the top overall average throughput (by far) at 4.59M bps.
Quick check.....
$2,792.00 (Froogle Directron) Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise, 25 Clients
$5,489.18 (Froogle Non Academic) SQL Server 2005 Complete
$5,619.00 (MS Website Retail) SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Server License with 5 CALs
$1,124.00 (Dell) Suse Enterprise Linux 9 With Server Hardwarex ?c=us&cs=555&l=en&oc=MLB1580&s=biz [dell.com] Couldn't find Suse Enterprise 10
Integrated LAMP Stackhttp://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpris eserver/lamp.html [novell.com]
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp
Hmmm, Could train a couple of Windows Admins with $11,000. Better yet just Hire a good Linux Admin.
To a large degree, we credit this strong showing to the high level of integration that exists among the components of this stack. While most of the open-source and Java systems are developed independently of each other, each of the .Net components is designed specifically to integrate and perform well together.
Even if the .Net stack had bombed convincingly in these tests, it would probably still maintain popularity in many companies.
Some people (PHBs) will never come around.
But its strong showing should give companies confidence that the .Net stack will handle most high-level enterprise needs.
For more than $12Grand it better blow away the Free Alternatives and configure itself and require zero admin.
I know I will get slammed for not using TCO but I don't believe those numbers at all. In my experience it takes the same amount of time for day to day maintenance. And when there is a problem (and there will be, no matter which one you choose) It costs me less time and therefore money to bring back up the Linux box.
Cost is not the only factor in a buying decision but is a factor, and if performance is arguably equal than it is a huge factor.
it's not "stacks", it's portals (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I know that Plone is a dog, and XOOPS may be popular on Sourceforge, but I don't think it's the most obvious choice for building a high performance portal using PHP. So, using these two as the basis for testing is silly.
The fact that JBoss Portal on Windows outpaces JBoss Portal on Linux has a simple reason: JBoss isn't fully open source; crucial parts of it (namely the Java runtime itself) are under Sun's control, and hell will freeze over before Sun bothers to do a good job implementing Java for their competitors' Linux systems.
As for things generally running faster on Windows, that's implausible. Differences between raw Windows and Linux system performance are at most in the single digit percentages, so if they saw any significant differences between the same applications running on top of the two platforms, either the application vendor spends more time tuning for Windows (as in Sun Java), or the testing labs screwed up.
In fact, the whole test is really ill conceived: none of the "portals" they compared provide the same functionality; it just doesn't make sense to test them against each other. Overall, this test mostly seems to test the competency of eWeek, and they aren't doing too well.
Re:Linux still wins (Score:4, Informative)
Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, 32-bit version - $399 Open NL
Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition - $999 (5 CALS)
Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition - $1,199 (10 CALS)
Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition - $3,999 (25 CALS)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtob
You can also get licenses for a lot less than retail on eBay, and it's perfectly legal. I've purchased Web Edition for as little as $200, and Enterprise for $1200. There are lots of companies who buy these things in bulk and end up not using them.
In addition, if you're not hosting an external site (customer facing) you can get an Action Pack subscription for about $300 that gives you access to up to 5 licenses for each of these OS's.
See: https://partner.microsoft.com/40016470 [microsoft.com]
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Re:Linux still wins (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's the price breakdown for a SINGLE webserver that allows external connections to authenticate (non-domain, say a e-commerce site with user accounts) against a SINGLE SQL 2005 Database. Sql Express is free, however it's not licensed for unlimited users in a production environment.
Web Server (Prices from CDW.com):
- 1 Copy Windows 2003 R2 (5 CALs): $959.99
- 1 External Connector License for Windows: $1,969.99
- Total: $2,929.98
SQL Server:- 1 Copy Windows 2003 R2 (5 CALs): $959.99
- 1 Copy SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition 1 Processor License: $3,819.99
- Total: $4,779.98
Grand Total for a single web and sql box: $7,709.96.And don't forget that you'll need SOME hardware to run that OS. Even barebones boxes with no data protection will run you $500 a box.
So, to start a basic e-commerce site on the legit, you're talking roughly $9,000 for windows and $1,000 for Linux/OSS.
TOUGH sell for Microsoft for the little guy.
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Re:Like saying 'A Ferrari outperforms a Mini' (Score:4, Insightful)
A better analogy is this, because they refused to do any tuning on the OSS technologies: They bought a Mustang GT and a Nissan 350z and put them in a race. Then they told the driver of the Nissan that he could only use first and second gear. It would be nice if the Nissan was so dramatically superior that it could win even with that handicap, but since even a Ferrari would lose to a Mustang GT with just two forward gears at its disposal, it didn't happen.
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