*BSD News Article 81921


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From: James Mansion <james@wgold.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.misc
Subject: Re: Unix too slow for a Web server?
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 07:57:29 +0000
Organization: Westongold Ltd
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Jason Costomiris wrote:
> Of course, this says nothing about how NT and OS/2 (did they find the
> other half yet? <g>) will perform under a heavy load.  The sad fact
> is they choke under a heavy load.  Take for example, Netscape's web site,
> which uses Sparcs, and MS's, which uses NT.  I've never seen slowness on
> Netscape's site.  As soon as MS comes out with something new, you get
> error messages from the server, like "too busy now".  That says
> enough for me.  (BTW, at last check, Netscape was taking around 100
> million hits a day...)

Last I heard, Netscape had a large number of T3s, and a considerable
number of very large Sequent boxes to serve their net site.

Its also the case that if you look at the number of people who pull
down large trials etc from the MS site that the site is extremely
heavily loaded.

I don't think one can draw any conclusions without knowing a lot about
the traffic and hardware serving it.

It does seem to be the case that the MS IIS solution can give very good
performance.  As O'Reilly pointed out when the absolute throughput of
WebSite was criticised, you need to spend an awful lot on bandwidth
(and have an awfully large user base) before you strain any of these
systems when serving documents.  CGI is another matter, but then that's
why you have ISAPI and NSAPI.

(All the tests I have seen show IIS/NT4 performing well on Intel
hardware.
All show that if you spend enough on Ultrasparc SMP solutions then you
can
go faster still.  If that's a surprise to anyone, I'd be stunned)

James