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Greetings,
Earlier today i was told that the throughput/data rate of unix and windows is different and unix is much faster. I tried to verify this online using google (searched for about a half hour) and was not able to find anything. I may be looking using the wrong keywords, so now i appeal to AntiOnline in hopes that someone will be able to give me concrete evidence one way or the other (or that there is no difference).
any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks in advance
I believe that was the case a few years ago when we were debating Unix v Windows servers. Mind you, it was difficult to get a level playing field, as the Unix boxes had Motorola processors which were much faster than the Intel equivalents on the Windows boxes.
I don't think I have read anything on the subject for at least 5 years now, or seen any true like on like statistics.
Another factor was probably that earlier versions of Unix certainly had less GUI bloat than Windows.
It would be interesting to see some current data.
Hmm, there is a little bit more to it than this. You have to look at hardware, configurations, installation, and uptime.
Hardware:
Obviously better hardware will give an advantage, so using two of the same box could make a cool project.
Configurations:
If you configure Windows Server 2003 for use with large Hardware toys, and put Free BSD on a similar box, well, Windows would have the advantage, as Free BSD ships with tweaks for low end hardware. You have to tweak it yourself if you use high end servers.
For installations, you have to look at what you installed. I"f you install less, you have less things wasting resources. Again, a Slackware box with a minimum install against a Windows server system may have an advantage. This one is a bit tricky though because Windows doesn't have as much as Linux and UNIX have.
Uptime:
If a Windows box has been up a long time, it will start to lag with memory leaks and a few other things. The longer the uptime on a machine, the more likely it is to be "Less than crisp".
Me and HT got bored one day and sarted talking about this and probably should have posted the conversation, but I still think UNIX is better for a server, as it's fast, stable, and uses less RAM. Why have a pretty GUI wasting RAM when the damn thing sits in a telco closet or similar anyway?
Also, there is already one thing that Linux and UNIX have to fall back with:
UNIX file systems do a sort of defrag on the fly, where Windows writes things all over the disk at times, and needs to be defragged. So if Linux does this on the fly, you'd think I/O time would be slower, and still it's faster.
the primary OS's i am looking at (just to add some more information) is on the unix side - TRU-64/HP-UX and on the windows side - 2k3 standard and enterprise
the reasoning i ask is because we are using a corporate backup software and we don't have special "storage node" licenses so all data is routed through the server so on a given night we have between 300 and 500 GB of data being backed up on our unix server and the same on our windows (which has the storage node licensing) server. even with that (and they are on comparible hardware -- not the same but close enough) the unix is getting done faster.
I am wondering if there is any good proof out there that i can use so that when i go into a meeting i will be able to show them this website authority and say something along the lines of "for what we are doing, it would be best to go with Unix because it is faster and is shown by {insert name} at this website {insert website}"
HP-UX supporting machines has some diferences from Intel Machines. Those risc machines usually have multibuses, so OS can start several I/O operations at same time. You get a medium IBM Risc machine for example, it can have 10 or 12 buses with hundreds os disk units connect to them. Its hard to see that config on Intel.
HP-UX, is far a know, have a memory-mapped I/o structure, so devices can be access on user mode thru memory, discardind the need of switching to back-and-forward to kernel mode to start i/o operations. Also, all devices are DMA and xfer are done transparently. Its a very good archicteture. Intel, on IA-32 and IA-64 archictectures,is too far from this kind of machine.
Instead looking for OS I/O comparision, you should look for "archictecure I/O comparision". of course O.S. helps the thruput, but the final merits is from hardware...