W2k3 impressions day 2

Ok, now I know why Microsoft has been working so hard on W2k8. Because W2k3 doesn’t scale well under load. Using our test rigs, and the apache “ab” program, we can see huge differences in the same hardware (literally the same, simply swapping out boot drives), between W2k8 and W2k3, with the latter barely about to eek out 60% of the theoretical max.

With W2k8, we were getting about 1 GB/s (8Gb/s) out of the unit with 10 clients running ab (specifically ‘ab -c 1 -n 100 -v 1 http://192.168.x.240/file1.txt’ where x=(1, 2, 5 .. 12). This is darned near 95% of theoretical max. Increasing concurrency slightly decreased throughput. However, with W2k3, the best we can get is about 60% of theoretical max. This is the case regardless of using IIS6 or Apache 2.2.9. If its not the web server, and its not the hardware, its gotta be the OS. Will try with Linux as well.