Re: www.microsoft.com sure needs a lot of silicon

 Brandon Long wrote in article <5joe02$r35_at_vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>...
>In comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix, Paul David Fox said something like
 this:
>>Steve Cole wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, 23 Apr 1997, Paul David Fox wrote:
>>>
>>> > is too heavyweight. (Do the Unix community have a decent alternative
>>> > to perl yet?, hint hint!).
>>>
>>> Yes. Python, Pike, TCL/TK, at least one other.
 

>>I take it that you are joking, right? Hahahaha.
 

>>I have nothing against Python, I dont know Pike, and I have
>>nothing against TCL.
 

>>But do you seriously think that a Unix box forking
>>off processes on every HTTP request is going to compete with
>>the DLL-deranged NT machines?
>
>A) I know of very few servers in use which do this, most prefork, which
>means they don't fork at the time the request comes in, and there are
>many advantages to this model over threaded servers (and at least as
>many advantages the other way)
>
>B) There are single servers for Unix, including phttpd for Solaris, not
>to mention the async servers like Boa and TinyHTTPd

1. I think what is implied in the previous post is ISAPI running its *CGI* [ rather server side compute apps ]. requests in the process space of its server. Pre-forking processes to handle incoming HTTP requests doesnt affect CGI does it ? ISAPI dlls are extensions to IIS, and is one of the templates for project creation since VC++ 4.2 I think. Apache does implement perl modules if you want them, atleast the load of invoking a separate Perl compiler/interpreter is removed. Most people do not use this feature yet, in my experience though.

>
>C) Try the same hardware running Apache/Linux or Apache/NetBSD against
>IIS/NTS4 and see the performance differences.
>

2] This is highly debateable, often the people comparing the two will optimize
only the OS they know and love. And leave the one they are against sub-optimal
or downright badly architected.
Still, I think for serving pure HTTP Linux/Apache is better. But ISAPI/IIS/NT can do much richer content and intel hardware and memory is
cheap enough to drive IIS into a range of performance sufficient to handle the load
for the very large majority of users. It doesnt matter if Apache/Linux can do 40 requests
per second and IIS/NT can only do 10 requests per second [ completely made up numbers ]
when the user only needs 5 requests per second. See ?

This is the threat to Unix, in every type of application. In the real world, people always choose
cheap easy to install.maintain good enough performance over great performance thats either expensive but difficult or expensive to setup or maintain. Unless you are a techie, who cares a great deal about pure performance, or an advocate who cares a great deal about a brand name
or hates a particular brand name.

Thus the fact that IIS is the most popular commercial server in existence according to www.netcraft.co.uk. Of course IIS is free with NT.
Already more than 20% i think it is of the worlds WWW serevers run on NT and that
number is growing. I think it will stabilize at 40%.

• paul chemmanoor.