Messages in this thread | | | From | (Linus Torvalds) | Subject | Re: Preparations for ZD's upcoming Apache/Linux benchmark | Date | 8 Jun 1999 05:11:24 GMT |
| |
In article <375C9C0D.650EB892@netplus.net>, Steve Bergman <steve@netplus.net> wrote: > >There was an earlier thread that touched on Apache optimizations but was >inconclusive on one point. Is it or is it not possible to get around >the thundering herd problem with multiple NIC's and Apache? Isn't that >Apache's main problem in this benchmark?
Apache's main problem is more likely to just be the fact that it isn't meant to be a speed deamon. The design was for other goals. The apache team seems to be working on performance, but the _big_ advantage in using Apache tends to be flexibility rather than raw performance on some not-very-real-world benchmarks.
The thundering herd thing shoul dbe fixed by just having the listen socket listen to SOCKADDR_ANY - which I _think_ is what apache does by default, but I have to admit to not having looked at the code in basically forever.
The other option, of course, is to run two copies of apache with different listening socket addresses.
>Apache is as much of an OSS poster child as Linux is. Using something >else like Zeus might win the battle but would lose the war.
Besides, it's not really what MS was interested in showcasing, and is not really what most peoples choice would be about anyway. So I think we may want to make sure Zeus or similar numbers are available to people, but also to some degree educate them on what the strengths of Apache are.
And I'm very interested in people doing kernel modules for static content serving with fall-backs to Apache etc. That is, to a large degree, what NT seems to be doing, with IIS-only magic system calls etc. And we can do it so much more cleanly.
> What is >really frustrating here is that while the netbench results have some >reasonable real world interpretation
Not really. I agree that the _hardware_ setup in netbench is more realistic (ie the network setup is at least something that in theory could be used at a real site), the actual netbench benchmark seems to be very unrealistic indeed. It's just creating lots of large temporary files without doing much else, which at least to me sounds very contrieved.
> , the webbench results are truly >meaningless in today's world. It almost seems like a diversionary >tactic to take people's time away from making apache better, by forcing >them to work on getting better numbers in a meaningless test.
Agreed.
However, the things is that web performance obviously _is_ important to a lot of people, and it's really hard to benchmark slow connections and lossy networks etc which is what most real-life uses are. So webbench is kind of a "default choice" - it's a bad benchmark of real-life behaviour, but there isn't anything else out there.
So it's understandable.
Linus
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |