At 7:56 PM -0700 4/20/99, Sean Hynes wrote:
>We are debating mySQL on NT vs Linux. I know linux doesn't have the gui
>overhead and is more stable, but we don't have time to learn
>command line operation on Linux. How much of a preformance loss are we
>looking at for strictly a NT/IIS 4.0 database server vs. Linux/ Apache
>system? Each server is a standalone database server.
NT might look prettier (although I haven't seen the K Desktop, and I think
Windows' GUI is far worse than MacOS and BeOS), but that doesn't make it
easy. I waste a lot of time going through tab after tab and searching
through different windows to find commands. NT is slow, unreliable and -
what is maybe even worse - unpredictable. My weekly full backup
occasionally slows from ~45 MB/min to 10 MB/min for no apparent reason,
causing timeouts in other scripts...I notice steady memory leaks that
noticeably impact performance, requiring me to reboot at least weekly. The
filesystem occasionally denies permission to the admin user for periods of
5 minutes to an hour, apparently after I access a script via CGI, making it
impossible to delete or rename that script. I could go on and on about
various problems. You can put the best windows in the world on an outhouse,
and it'll still stink. I'm in the process of rewriting some Visual Basic
apps in Perl & PHP, and when that's done NT4 is leaving my server and Linux
and/or FreeBSD is taking its place.
Now I actually like GUI interfaces, but the command line isn't actually
that hard to use. I often used DOS windows under NT simply because it was
far easier at times to do a ping, traceroute, xcopy or something like that.
I have an UltraSparc Solaris machine now as well, and I use the GUI system
(Common Desktop Environment) about 50% of the time there.
Give me some more time and I could provide more concrete examples of NT
problems, but the time you spend learing the more complex (because of more
flexibility) Unix commands will be quickly earned back with ease of
maintenance and reliability.
And, lastly, with a little design care Perl/PHP/MySQL/PostGreSQL-based
programs can be developed and easily moved back and forth between NT and
Unix platforms, so it doesn't need to be an either/or choice (in contrast
to developing ASP/Visual Basic programs, unless you shell out $$$ for
ChiliASP).
-steve
+--------------- my people are the people of the dessert, ---------------+
| Steve Edberg Computer Consultant |
| sbedberg@stripped University of California, Davis |
| (530)753-7605 (530)754-9127 |
+---------------- said t e lawrence, picking up his fork ----------------+
