The following was posted to the RISKS digest. I thought it would be of interest to LIG. Narayana ------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 22:44:32 +0000 From: Joaquim Baptista <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: The cost of Windows virus I am deploying a custom-made server program that makes several manipulations of XML files, including an automated conversion to Word. It had been a mystery why the production server, a Pentium 700 with SCSI disks running Windows 2000, was much slower than the development server, a Pentium 500 with IDE disks. Yesterday, a particular long processing involving a 53MB RTF file just run forever. I killed it consumed after 3 hours of CPU. Then, we decided to turn off the anti-virus software. A sample task that took over six minutes now takes two and a half minutes. And the very long processing now runs in 15 minutes. Therefore, the cost of the Windows virus includes the cost of running the anti-virus software. It cripples my server to less than half its performance. My Pentium 700 becomes a Pentium 270 (usual case)! On some cases, the anti-virus software delays the computation at least 24 times, and the Pentium 700 becomes less than a Pentium 30! Linux suddenly seems a lot cheaper! Joaquim Baptista, alias pxQuim, Director, Technical Documentation [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------- Find out more about this and other Linux India mailing lists at http://lists.linux-india.org/
