What reason might Dell give for running www.dell.co.uk on NT4?

• When we say "Upgrade!" you must do what we say, not do what we do
• We're still waiting for our order to be delivered
• It's not broke, and we dont need to fix it.
• We're less of a target for attackers. There's no kudos in hacking anything more than 5 years old.
• We've been evaluating Linux, and have not yet reached a decision.
• It's just the front end machines. Everything else has been running Windows 2003 for months. Honest!
• The cobblers children didnt have shoes, either.
• That site doesnt see a lot of traffic. It just redirects to www.euro.dell.com
• If you think that running NT4 doesnt do a lot for our product advocacy, then you haven't seen what our evil competitor runs

This week Mandrake became the first major Linux distribution to fall into administration. The survey finds around 88,000 sites running Mandrake, and the distribution also enjoys a reasonable following on the desktop.

The increasing availability and falling costs of high bandwidth connections have posed a question to the continuing relevance of the Linux distribution industry. In 1995 only the very determined would have downloaded the Linux operating system over a 28.8K connection rather than pay for a CD, but equiped with a cable or DSL connection, the CD becomes much more optional.

Mandrake compounded this scenario by some commercially curious behaviour, making freely downloadable images of each new release available over the internet well before their CD editions were available. Mandrake's approach was popular but seemed to actively encourage people to download the new releases rather than buy CDs. More opportunistic companies have been able to sell CDs of new Mandrake releases for weeks before Mandrake's own boxed sets became available.

Sun launched its Identity Server this week, which is positioned as the first component of the Liberty Alliance single sign-on scheme for web site authentication. When the Liberty Alliance was first announced, it seemed that its position was hopeless, as Microsoft Passport and AOL SNS already had their systems implemented and deployed. However, Passport and SNS have not by any means become pervasive, with this months survey finding fewer than 100 unique sites using these systems and Liberty now seems to have a plausible chance to compete with the established systems. 

This month is the first time that a Windows 2000 site has appeared in the  50 top sites which have the longest period of time since last reboot. www.byteandswitch.com has been running continuously since November 2000. When we first started graphing web servers uptime in the summer of 2000, many people were skeptical that a Windows machine would ever make the top 50. Perceptions change, and although two years is exceptional, several Windows 2000 sites have run for more than a year without a reboot. In the hosting industry, Microsoft partners Interliant and Devine each have sites that have not been rebooted in over a year, while Microsoft has also run several of its own sites for over a year between reboots. 

www.intel.com is one of a very small number of well known sites running both Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 in a load balanced pool, and has become a tempting target for people to use as a straw in the wind towards the relative performance of the two operating systems. One person mailed us saying he thought that the Intel site's response time had slowed since Intel started using Windows 2003, and asked for confirmation and explanation.

The performance of www.intel.com shows a saw tooth formation, with some responses consistently longer than others. Matching up the response times with the corresponding server signatures actually does confirm that the responses served by Microsoft-IIS/6.0 are consistently longer than those served by Microsoft-IIS/5.0.

Analysing the response time graph more carefully shows that the connection time and time to serve the first byte are consistent across the two sets of servers, but the time to serve the complete request is significantly higher on the Microsoft-IIS/6.0 servers.

Response times in seconds from www.intel.com to  London at Mid-day on 16 Jan 2003 by web server
Server	Microsoft-IIS/5.0	Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Quickest	1.22	2.00
Slowest	1.28	2.21
Average	1.25	2.09

It is important to appreciate that the difference need not be directly caused by the system software. Other plausible reasons could include;

• The hardware specification of the Microsoft-IIS/5.0 machines may be faster than those running Microsoft-IIS/6.0
• The configuration of the systems is likely to be different
• From looking at the tcp/ip characteristics, we think it is likely that the www.intel.com front page is served dynamically, and  the migration of the application that generates the dynamic content may have introduced a performance penalty
• The configuration of the local network at  Intel may have disadvantaged the Microsoft-IIS/6.0 machines in some way.