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> PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows — even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed th

> PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows — even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead. It’s pretty funny to see that in 2006 Elon Musk didn’t even deserve a mention of his name. How things have changed...

redis_mlc 7y ago
Pretty common when new managers "get an idea." A new manager at Google wanted to shift Adsense (I believe) to Oracle Enterprise from MySQL. Some favorable MySQL benchmarks stopped that. Responsys was all-Windows for quite a while. They eventually migrated their server farm to Linux. Almost certainly a combination of performance and an internal license audit (using Microsoft server products to scale a SaaS is brutally expensive.)
pragmatic 7y ago
We laugh now, but I remember reading that iis on windows nt blew the doors of Apache in the late 90s/early 00s. I'd love to find the source as I can't find it right now, bit I thought that was bc Apache could only fork back then, etc
- zbentley 7y ago
  > I thought that was bc Apache could only fork back then Shit, nobody tell the Postgres folks that fork-only parallelism doesn't work...
- alexkcd 7y ago
  I remember reading that too. I think Ben Horowitz might have talked about this in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, though I might be misremembering the source.