[humorix] Windows 2003 Really Does Outperform Linux!

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

Windows 2003 Really Does Outperform Linux!

HUMORIX WORLD HEADQUARTERS -- For years, the Blartner Group and
various other prestigious research firms have issued benchmarks
claiming that Linux is inferior to Windows.  Naturally, we at
Humorix have always been skeptical.  But while scraping the
bottom of the barrel for story ideas last week, we decided to
see if we could duplicate any of these benchmarks on our own.

It turned out to be a lot harder than we thought, but we
finally concocted a scenario in which Windows outshines Linux.

First, the Humorix Vast Research Center & Basement of Doom(tm)
wanted to try a fair, head-to-head matchup between two
computers with identical specs.  Obviously, a leading-edge
company such as Blartner would immediately skip this worthless
step in one of their benchmarks, but we wanted to cover all of
our bases.

Using every measurement tool we could find, the machine running
the latest version of Red Hat and Apache simply outperformed
the machine running the latest service pack of Windows and
IIS.  Even after tweaking the settings to handicap Linux --
such as downgrading to an unstable 2.1 kernel -- we still
couldn't make Windows look good.

Next, we installed our secret weapon on the Linux box:
killrandom(3).   Every few seconds, this daemon randomly picks
a victim process to kill, thereby simulating the Windows
experience.  Even with killrandom running at full blast, the
Linux machine still achieved respectable performance.

Frustrated by our lack of success, we finally moved to the
"nuclear option": setting the number of allowed IIS and Apache
users to zero. We then performed a simulation of the Slashdot
Effect on both machines.  The Windows machine was able to serve
an amazing 2179 "Server Too Busy" error messages in one second.
Meanwhile, Linux and Apache only managed to generate a meager
1673 such error pages.

"Windows is very good at doing nothing fast," joked one of the
Humorix lab assistants during the benchmark study/keg party.

Additional research also showed that Windows and IIS were able
to return 42% more 404 File Not Found errors than Linux and
Apache in the same time period.  Unfortunately, we were not
able to achieve the same success when serving pages with a
status code of 200.

Nevertheless, the staff of Humorix has conclusively
demonstrated that Windows is capable of outperforming Linux.
So, Microsoft, when do we get our bribe... er, research grant?


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