3 ms·

> MS stack is more performant than the Linux one on the same hardware Could you please provide some evidence to support that?

by shepik 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago
Without breaking any promises to others here is an article with conclusions quite similar to mine: http://www.webperformance.com/load-testing/blog/2011/11/what-is-the-fastest-webserver/ http://www.webperformance.com/load-testing/blog/2011/11/what... Keep in mind that it hardly ever is the webserver that is the bottle neck. My theory on why this is the case is very simple: MS can afford to throw vast amounts of money at optimizations that are next to impossible in Linux simply because the coupling between the layers in Linux is looser. And that's a good thing, it translates into better security and fewer bugs. As always, optimization alone is not a reason enough to go down a certain path. But for raw speed on requests it's fairly hard to beat IIS, if that's what you're after (I'm usually not, and even when it matters I can comfortably saturate most outbound links from a single server doing light processing, and as soon as the processing becomes the bottle-neck the CPU cache size, RAM and so on matter more than your OS, but given identical hardware a 'dirty' approach should yield better results at a cost of unreliability/complexity).
- shepik 12y ago
  Tight coupling and money are a good arguments, thanks. However, i believe we are comparing apples to oranges here. IIS uses it's own kernel module, HTTP.SYS - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/a2a45c42-38bc-464c-a097-d7a202092a54.mspx?mfr=true http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer20... So, looks like having specific kernel api optimized for your particular usecase is an advantage, which IIS has and others don't. It turns out there are kernel-mode webservers (or there were, at least), which seriously outperform user-mode ones. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix01/full_papers/joubert/joubert.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix01/full_papers/jo... (page 11; article is old, but anyway)

> MS stack is more performant than the Linux one on the same hardware Could you please provide some evidence to support that?

by shepik 12y ago

> MS stack is more performant than the Linux one on the same hardware Could you please provide some evidence to support that?

jacquesm 12y ago

Without breaking any promises to others here is an article with conclusions quite similar to mine: http://www.webperformance.com/load-testing/blog/2011/11/what-is-the-fastest-webserver/ http://www.webperformance.com/load-testing/blog/2011/11/what... Keep in mind that it hardly ever is the webserver that is the bottle neck. My theory on why this is the case is very simple: MS can afford to throw vast amounts of money at optimizations that are next to impossible in Linux simply because the coupling between the layers in Linux is looser. And that's a good thing, it translates into better security and fewer bugs. As always, optimization alone is not a reason enough to go down a certain path. But for raw speed on requests it's fairly hard to beat IIS, if that's what you're after (I'm usually not, and even when it matters I can comfortably saturate most outbound links from a single server doing light processing, and as soon as the processing becomes the bottle-neck the CPU cache size, RAM and so on matter more than your OS, but given identical hardware a 'dirty' approach should yield better results at a cost of unreliability/complexity).

shepik 12y ago
Tight coupling and money are a good arguments, thanks. However, i believe we are comparing apples to oranges here. IIS uses it's own kernel module, HTTP.SYS - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/a2a45c42-38bc-464c-a097-d7a202092a54.mspx?mfr=true http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer20... So, looks like having specific kernel api optimized for your particular usecase is an advantage, which IIS has and others don't. It turns out there are kernel-mode webservers (or there were, at least), which seriously outperform user-mode ones. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix01/full_papers/joubert/joubert.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix01/full_papers/jo... (page 11; article is old, but anyway)