On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 16:27, Mike MacCana wrote: > > Although we all will agree Linux for a headless server will > > always outperform its windows counterpart :) > > Why?
You know, that's a good question to ask. I used to think that running a Windows server in a production environment was ridiculous. But there are lots of people who do so. Of course the reason for that is that XYZ application they need works there. Oracle, for example, doesn't really care whether it's running on Windows, Unix, or Linux [quite impressive, really]. Certainly, there is a lot of software in the ERP and business analysis space that [has to] run on Windows Server. People with Unix/Linux backgrounds are accustomed to administering machines remotely and likewise used to doing things via command line interfaces. But in a large in house corporate data centre, people sometimes (for legacy reasons if nothing else) have the infrastructure they need to KVM large numbers of machines. To the actual performance question: I imagine that the assumption is that running an X server on a machine that "doesn't need it" is wasteful of resources. Certainly if you're *using* that X server for a graphical user environment, you'll be generating a lot of load that will detract from the horsepower available for real services. The assumption would seem to be that since a Windows server needs to run it's graphical environment, whereas a headless (presumably implying X -less) Linux box does not, a Windows server must under-perform a Linux one. I'm not so sure how much the GUI matters in reality. I think the real key is "using the graphical interface". While X is a large beastie, to be sure, if it's just sitting there not doing anything then a lot of it can get swapped out - and will be as more active server processes consume resources. Which all makes me think that a Windows server's GUI may not be as much as a penalty performance wise as we might think. It would be interesting to find some unbiased statistics about all that. Another domain, Java VM performance, shows Windows servers doing just fine. From a year ago: http://www.volano.com/report/ Doesn't mean I would recommend Windows by any stretch. I'm an operations guy - the ability to remote administer farms of Linux systems and the ability to finely control system layout, activity, and performance is the critical differentiator. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie t 02 9977 6866 m 04 1079 6725 OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
