Zeus Technology, Ltd., developer of mission-critical web server
technologies and solutions, has announced that benchmark tests
performed by the IBM Linux Technology Center in Austin, TX,
demonstrate that Zeus Web Server performance can be boosted by more
than 85% running Linux 2.4 as compared to Linux 2.2.x.
Unlike most web servers, the Zeus architecture uses a fixed
number of single-threaded I/O multiplexing processes, each capable
of handling tens of thousands of simultaneous connections, coupled
with a kernel-threaded component for high-performance dynamic
content. This architecture achieves near-linear scalability on SMP
platforms. Zeus claims that using the new Symmetric Multiprocessing
(SMP) capabilities in the Linux 2.4 kernel allows their web server
to significantly outperform all other Web servers in this
environment and easily scale to future, bandwidth-intensive
application requirements.
The tests were performed by the IBM Linux Technology Center
using the SPECweb99 Web server benchmarking system and a
twenty-client test network. The server machine was a Netfinity 7000
M10 450 MHZ Pentium II 4 CPUs with 4 IBM EtherJet 10/100 Ethernet
cards and 4 GB of RAM, running Zeus Web Server 3.3.7. During the
test the Zeus server saturated the network bandwidth before the
limits of the server were reached. Further information can be found
at:
http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/linux/whitepapers/smp/sm
pscalability.html.