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Thanks to Jason Perlow for this information. FYI:
Jason Perlow
----Original Message Follows---- From: Chris Lemmons To: Nick Stam CC: Jason Perlow, dvorak@dvorak.org,Steve Buehler, Jeffrey Witt,Eric Hale, Tom Ponzo Subject: Re: contacts at PC mag for Linux performance test Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 17:36:24 -0400 Greetings : Just wanted to give a quick response to this thread. First, the ServerBench port for Linux is available for testing. There were some performance issues early in development that turned out to be mainly related to the network configuration we were using. Once these were worked out, things got a lot better for Linux compared to NT 4.0. We did a lot of investigation of ServerBench performance with Linux concerning how Linux manages their data and write cache that had an impact on the ServerBench scores. What it boils down to is that, at least for ServerBench, because of the way Linux manages cache, it runs out of data cache before NT 4.0. This causes the disk subsystem to become a bigger factor earlier in the test. Obviously, when you have to start hitting the disk, the performance is going to suffer, particularly if you have a poorly tuned RAID or no RAID at all. We haven't really looked at NetBench/Linux in that detail, but plan to now that we've pretty much got the new network benchmarks out the door. I do remember seeing the results where Linux beat NT using NetBench. As I recall, the server had a single disk spindle and only 64MB of RAM. With that amount of RAM, NT is only going to be able to cache the data for about 2 NetBench clients after taking what it needs for the OS before having the test grind to because of the disk bottleneck created by the single slow disk drive. I believe Linux has a much smaller footprint and could probably cache the data for a few more NetBench clients. I think this is probably the main difference in the scores. After reading the Mindcraft white paper referred to in this thread, there are a couple of things that I'd keep in mind for WebBench testing. 1. They concentrated solely on the WebBench static test. To achieve the best results here, the web server needs to cache the entire contents of the workload. This is about 6000 files of about 60 MB in size. IIS 4.0/NT can cache this workload automatically with 256MB of RAM or more. To the best of my knowledge, Apache does not cache HTTP requests in and of itself. It needs something like Squid configured to perform caching. I didn't see anything in the Mindcraft white paper mentioning that there was any caching configured for Apache. 2. When ZD runs WebBench tests, we generally run the CGI tests in addition to the static tests. the CGI tests are much more CPU intensive than the static tests and can provide a more complete picture of web server performance by looking at how well it handles the execution of dynamic applications. Certainly this is something being required more and more of web servers in the real world. -Chris  
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