Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

The benchmarketing wars continue. However, this time the playing field is fair (not financed by one of the players) and the results are very decisive.

The SpecWEB benchmarks were set up with various harwdware and software platforms, specifically the Linux vs. NT setups were as follows:

"Dell PowerEdge 6400/700, one running Red Hat Tux 1.0 and the other running Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Both were running with 4 CPU's (700MHz Pentium III Xeon), 4 Network Controllers and 8GB of RAM."

The bottom line was that while there were a few very minor differences in the hardware setups, Linux and Apache was-is much faster then NT and IIS. With a properly configured Linux and Apache machine there is not much of a contest and this is contrary to the infamous Mindcraft benchmarks that previously placed NT in front of Linux (again, while being funded by M$, imagine that!)

Here are the results:

There were a few differences in the hardware: the W2K machine had 7 9GB 10kRPM hard drives with a Dell PERC2 Disk Controllers and the Tux 1.0 machine had 5 9GB 10kRPM hard drives with an Adaptec AIC-7899 SCSI Disk Controller. In addition, the Client machines, while being very similar in configuration, had the same brand of Network Controller (Alteon) but a different model number for the W2K test (AceNIC PCI) than the one for the Tux 1.0 test (AceNIC 1000SX).

Here is the interesting part: The W2K machine received a score of SPECweb99 = 1598, which means that it was able to handle a median of 1598 Conforming Simultaneous Connections. The Red Hat Tux 1.0 machine received a score of SPECweb99 = 4200, which means that is was able to handle a median of 4200 Conforming Simultaneous Connections.

  SpecWEB Benchmarks