Very Computer

    I've crossposted this article to several .advocacy groups, so you
may want to send replies via email rather than ignite yet another
flamewar. :-)

    I have a programmer here who is interested in running a Web server.
He has asked me what sort of overall load capability the different Web
servers have.  He'll be running more of a transaction environment than a
one-way service.  He asked me what the difference is between Solaris,
Linux and BSD.   How many hits/second can these different systems
support?  Is there a particular Web server he should use?  Is there
anyone online who collects this sort of statistic?

    This is what I told him so far:  I have heard that the Sun and BSD
guys sort of laugh at Linux because its networking falls over when it's
under a heavy CPU load.  I've heard that BSD's networking is very
stable, though I don't remember which of the two free variants was
'better' for his application.  I don't know much about Solaris at all.

    I'd appreciate any opinions or pointers.   :-)

<<RON>>

:     This is what I told him so far:  I have heard that the Sun and BSD
: guys sort of laugh at Linux because its networking falls over when it's
: under a heavy CPU load.  I've heard that BSD's networking is very
: stable, though I don't remember which of the two free variants was
: 'better' for his application.  I don't know much about Solaris at all.

Well, there are Linux zealots, and BSD Nazis... ignore them both.

Linux has a bit of a speed advantage over *BSD, and *BSD tends to have a
stability advantage over Linux in heavy network traffic.  Still, they are
both excellent choices, and your friend will probably be happy with either
Linux or Free/Net/OpenBSD.  The only thing that *really* dictates choosing
between them is "what technical preferences do I have?".  :)
--
Stephen S. Edwards II -- Support GNU... run UNIX... be happy.

*** You have been kicked off of channel #sane (banned:  Welcome to hell!)
"Don't *WHAM* touch *WHAM* that! *WHAM*WHAM*WHAM*" -- Michael J. Peterson

<snip>

Quote:>    I have a programmer here who is interested in running a Web server.
>He has asked me what sort of overall load capability the different Web
>servers have.  He'll be running more of a transaction environment than a
>one-way service.  He asked me what the difference is between Solaris,
>Linux and BSD.   How many hits/second can these different systems
>support?  Is there a particular Web server he should use?  Is there
>anyone online who collects this sort of statistic?

Quote:>    This is what I told him so far:  I have heard that the Sun and BSD
>guys sort of laugh at Linux because its networking falls over when it's
>under a heavy CPU load.  I've heard that BSD's networking is very
>stable, though I don't remember which of the two free variants was
>'better' for his application.  I don't know much about Solaris at all.

Again, your choice depends on availability of people clued in the
particular system. No official tech support will replace it.
Oh, and your choice depends on the platform:
        Intel - all are available
        old Sparc - Linux, SunOS 4, OpenBSD (FreeBSD and SunOS 5 are not
available AFAIK; dunno about NetBSD)
        new Sparc - all but FreeBSD (and may be NetBSD)
        Alpha - Linux, OpenBSD (may be NetBSD; FreeBSD port should appear)

Quote:>    I'd appreciate any opinions or pointers.   :-)

><<RON>>

:     This is what I told him so far:  I have heard that the Sun and BSD
: guys sort of laugh at Linux because its networking falls over when it's
: under a heavy CPU load.  I've heard that BSD's networking is very
: stable, though I don't remember which of the two free variants was
: 'better' for his application.  I don't know much about Solaris at all.
:     I'd appreciate any opinions or pointers.   :-)

If this is exclusively for web server applications, you will find more
information in the March 1998 edition of Byte. I believe
Digital Unix 4.0D got the Editor's choice because of its IO capabilities.
To summarize:
Digital Unix 4.0D       4/5
NT 4.0                  4/5
Solaris 2.6             2/5
HPUX 11.0               4/5
AIX 4.3                 2/5
Caldera OpenLinux       2/5

Jeff
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| Jeffery Chow   4th year Computer Science, UBC        |
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| This message brought to you by Bill Gates, inventor  |
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Little wonder it was slow.

Casper
--
Expressed in this posting are my opinions.  They are in no way related
to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

Quote:>         Choice mostly depends on the demography of clueful people around.
> DejaNews runs on Linux, Yahoo - on FreeBSD. I don't know anything of that
> scale running on Solaris, but again, that may be my ignorance. Remember,
> every OS sucks, but no OS sucks as hard as benchmarks do. BTW, you don't
> need X on server, so Solaris is not a correct name - it's SunOS 5.x
> As for the server - Apache, indeed.

Quote:>         Alpha - Linux, OpenBSD (may be NetBSD; FreeBSD port should appear)

    Thanks for the reply. :)

<<RON>>

Quote:>one-way service.  He asked me what the difference is between Solaris,
>Linux and BSD.   How many hits/second can these different systems
>support?  Is there a particular Web server he should use?  Is there
>anyone online who collects this sort of statistic?

I did not do comparisons with other servers just our aging SPARC 20 but
examined its behaviour under various loads.  The loads were created by
Perl scripts running on other workstations which would connect to the web
server and retrieve one of several objects which consisted of a mixture of
small and large HTML files and simple CGI programs (Perl and compiled C)
and a complex Perl CGI program.

In the test, a heavy load was only 10 transactions/second, however, my
observations were that the limiting factor appeared to be the network
bandwidth to the server.  At the time, it had only 10mbs ethernet
connections and in one student lab where I was trying to run the loading
scripts on a dozen different workstations, I found that fewer than half
the systems in the lab could monopolize the lab network (thinwire) and
effectively lock out the rest.

As the report indicates, the web server is not dedicated as such but is
also our main NFS server, the license server for a number of applications,
our FTP server and a router for two student labs.  We are just now
considering moving the web to a dedicated machine, not because there are
performance problems, but because it appears the web is here to stay and
we want to avoid potential problems as the load continues to grow.
--

Quote:>         new Sparc - all but FreeBSD (and may be NetBSD)

Quote:>         Alpha - Linux, OpenBSD (may be NetBSD; FreeBSD port should appear)

: Again, your choice depends on availability of people clued in the
: particular system. No official tech support will replace it.
: Oh, and your choice depends on the platform:
:       Intel - all are available
:       old Sparc - Linux, SunOS 4, OpenBSD (FreeBSD and SunOS 5 are not
: available AFAIK; dunno about NetBSD)
:       new Sparc - all but FreeBSD (and may be NetBSD)
:       Alpha - Linux, OpenBSD (may be NetBSD; FreeBSD port should appear)

A FreeBSD-SPARC port is in the works, too.  I'm so e*d, especially
now that Sun is coming out with cheap desktop workstations.

--

 Ben

"You have your mind on computers, it seems."

Quote:>     This is what I told him so far:  I have heard that the Sun and BSD
> guys sort of laugh at Linux because its networking falls over when it's
> under a heavy CPU load.

--
 H3C-N--C=N      | Kenneth R. Kinder, aka Bouncing     "code=caffiene*hours"

    O=<__>N-C3H  |
  H3C-N \\O      |                   Ken & Ted's Software

<<RON>>

Quote:>>>>     This is what I told him so far:  I have heard that the Sun and BSD
>>>> guys sort of laugh at Linux because its networking falls over when it's
>>>> under a heavy CPU load.

   Current Time: Wed Mar 18 00:30:16 1998
   Restart Time: Sat Mar 14 22:07:30 1998
   Server uptime: 3 days 2 hours 22 minutes 46 seconds
   Total accesses: 6028029 - Total Traffic: 209.9 GB
   CPU Usage: u58.3 s185.5 cu277.29 cs105.19 - 0.234% CPU load
   22.5 requests/sec - 0.8 MB/second - 36.5 kB/request
   295 requests currently being processed, 1 idle servers

At the current rate of traffic, this machine should push somewhere in the
neighborhood of 2T this month. In reality, it probably won't get quite so much
as weekends tend to be heavier use (last reset to perform a kernel upgrade).

Here's the 'short term' data stats from another popular server:

   Current Time: Wed Mar 18 00:46:00 1998
   Restart Time: Tue Mar 17 23:36:00 1998
   Server uptime: 1 hour 10 minutes
   Total accesses: 47301 - Total Traffic: 3.3 GB
   CPU Usage: u14.15 s28.27 cu18.28 cs7.23 - 1.62% CPU load
   11.3 requests/sec - 0.8 MB/second - 73.8 kB/request
   260 requests currently being processed, 0 idle servers

This one has a tendancy to push larger files which drives up the load average
somewhat (longer 'lifetime' of requests).

In both cases, the throughput is ~ 800k/s... easily enough to saturate a
10-base ethernet segment in a production environment. Both of these machines
use 100baseT 3com 3c905 rev 4b cards on linux 2.0.33 (now... the first one
had 2.0.32 until a few days ago).

The machines themselves are hardly breaking a sweat, and both make fairly
extensive use of CGI.

Additional comments about linux network suitability?

--
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 |  Rick Franchuk  -  TranSpecT Consulting  |
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