AlbertPacino
Skilled
According to figures given in the report, Win2k3 servers provided best performance while serving out static pages (HTML pages only) on 8 processor (8P) servers. But on single processor servers certain Linux configurations (RHAS + TUX + Apache) can provide similar performance. It is very unlikely that enterprises will use 8-way servers to serve out HTML-only pages. However, it might be reasonable to expect single processor (1P) systems to be used, in which case, the benefits gained by using Win2003 are marginal (12% over corresponding Linux configurations).
In the case of Dynamic workloads, consisting of 80% static content and 20% CGI content, the performance provided by the Linux configurations was quite reasonable. While serving out dynamic content, Win2k3 servers on single processor (1P) servers provide just 4% performance gain over Linux servers, where as in 8P servers the performance gain is about 12% as compared to the Linux servers used in the tests.
The E-commerce workload consisted of 76% static content, 16% CGI content and 8% SSL3.0 based static and CGI content. In this case, Win2k3 on 1P server provides upto 73% performance gain over Linux but this falls down to 14% on 8-way servers. This clearly shows that the Linux servers provide better performance scale-up as the number of processors increases.
In terms of percentage increase in requests served per second when moving from single processor to 8-way servers, Win2k3 provided a 130% increase for Dynamic CGI content. Both Linux configurations used in the tests provided about the same percentage increase (with RHAS/Apache combination providing up to 129%). In the case of E-Commerce workloads, Win2k3 offered the least percentage performance increase (a 127% increase as compared to 131% by RHAS/TUX/Apache and 129% increase by RHAS/Apache).
The report shows that certain Linux configurations provided better performance scale up over the Windows 2003 Server. All the more reason for enterprises to evaluate Linux distributions and software for their servers.
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