What is the most reliable and popular web server (hardware and software)?
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We have over 400 websites running on an Windows 2003 / IIS 6 server with 90% of them connected to a SQL Server backend system. Some are smaller sites than others, but by and large they are probably typical websites for the typical small business. These are not e-commerce sites, per se, but they do use SQL for a lot of their content. We had minor problems before we upgraded our hardware, but the problems were caused by running out of disk space more than anything. A few years ago we had problems when we had our servers at a less than reliable data center whose power was not conditioned properly. But now that we have our servers in a stable environment with proper hardware (and by that, what we have isn't really all that much -- RAID 5, 2GB RAM and dual Xeon 2.4GHz CPU's), the system runs quite well. I don't believe that I have ever used IISReset personally. To tell you the truth, I don't know that I have ever even heard of it. But, do we have to reboot the server? Yeah. Just about every second Tuesday of every month -- i.e. on Patch Tuesdays. It's not rebooting to fix a problem but to reboot due to applying a security patch. Does that make it less reliable than Apache on Linux? I don't know. We run Apache on a Windows machine and it seems to be about the same reliability -- only needing rebooting on patch Tuesdays. But we don't have any Linux machines, so I can't give you a fair comparison there. And we only have one website running on Apache, so that's not a fair comparison either.
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I sort of resent measuring stability by measuring server uptime. Stability should be measured in service uptime. This often means putting a load balancing and or failover scheme in place. Why, Stuff happens. If you have a no downtime policy. Patching, HW failures, db failures, backup failures, power outages... becomes part of the plan. The question you should be asking your self is why things are failing. Odds are its your application, not webserver, OS, memory or what ever. My personal walk of shame includes :-O
- Is your web-app starting to misbehave after 3 weeks, and you can't fix it? Make sure you restart the application 4 AM every week.
- Can't coupe with traffic load and you can't make the application less talkative? Time for an upgrade or rather an additional server.
- IIS starts eating memory running in a .NET environment and you have mistreated IDisposable (I have never strolled down this path :sigh: and made a mess ) add a bucket of memory, restart server nightly... :doh:
- configuring backup job to run during peak hours
- not using cache, caching to much, corrupting the cache...
My point is, putting an equal sign between uptime and stability is as flawed as measuring cpu-power by MHz. It will say something about the processor but nothing about raw processing power. Or in this case, server uptime don't say much about service level from a customer point of view. /Matthew
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I often hear people say that IIS on Windows server is not reliable and not suitable for a big site. What is reliable and popular one? Does anyone know if there is any analysis/statistics done on different web server hardware and software?
TOMZ_KV
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I often hear people say that IIS on Windows server is not reliable and not suitable for a big site. What is reliable and popular one? Does anyone know if there is any analysis/statistics done on different web server hardware and software?
TOMZ_KV
IIS is not reliable? Really? I've never had much of a problem with IIS. Doing the initial configuration is a bit of a hassle sometimes but, after that, all seems to run pretty smoothly. Of course, I've never admined a 'large' site before so that could make a big difference. About two hundred simultaneous connections have been my limit, which is very small considering the size of the world out there. All my work has been for internal websites for corporations though. I'm sure Apache is a very reliable platform but we're talking a big change from IIS. I follow that asp.net road, not the lamp road, so Apache wouldn't be my choice just because of that fact.
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I often hear people say that IIS on Windows server is not reliable and not suitable for a big site. What is reliable and popular one? Does anyone know if there is any analysis/statistics done on different web server hardware and software?
TOMZ_KV
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I often hear people say that IIS on Windows server is not reliable and not suitable for a big site. What is reliable and popular one? Does anyone know if there is any analysis/statistics done on different web server hardware and software?
TOMZ_KV
Depends on many factors. Since everyone else will be answering your main question, I'm going to answer a related one. "What's the best personal web server?" My answer: Mbedthis AppWeb. It simply rocks. It is a small, high-performance, personal web server good for desktop implementations or SME businesses that don't need something like IIS or Apache. It supports SSL and PHP, among other things, and runs on numerous operating systems. I was creating and testing web pages and got tired of FrontPage PWS's lack of features. I didn't want to pay for IIS and Apache seemed quite complicated to setup right on Windows. I found AppWeb on Wikipedia and have been using it ever since, with much satisfaction. Anyone looking for a personal or small business web server should definitely consider AppWeb. It served me well. ;)
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BTW if anyone tells you IIS is not good for big sites; MySpace. You might not like MySpace but they do massive load* and it is all .NET and IIS. They gave a talk at Mix'06 and the primary issues were the same issues LAMP users face; software and hardware architecture. * Still way more than Facebook. Don't let Facebok fanboys mix you up, MySpace kicks their arse in every area including making money. OK, OK, except growth. Facebook has better growth but it will top-out just like MySpace has. And they still won't be making any money.
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
"MySpace kicks their arse in every area including making money." (Paul Watson) What are you talking about Paul? Coming from an application developer, that statement is hard to believe. I remember when MySpace was just cluttered pages full of user-submitted HTML, with not much in line of extra features. I didn't use it for chat much because I couldn't integrate it well with everything else like I do email and IM. Facebook took an alternative approach with their popular API and tried to create a more open platform for developers. The result was that, when I first checked it out, there were tools for doing almost everything with my FaceBook account. I often didn't even have to visit the facebook site! MySpace and Facebook have both come a long way since then. MySpace is certainly more popular and successful, but I think Facebook is still better from developer's standpoint. MySpace has followed their lead a bit, and it would be great to see them do more in that area. Then, I might be a MySpace fanbois. Maybe...
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"MySpace kicks their arse in every area including making money." (Paul Watson) What are you talking about Paul? Coming from an application developer, that statement is hard to believe. I remember when MySpace was just cluttered pages full of user-submitted HTML, with not much in line of extra features. I didn't use it for chat much because I couldn't integrate it well with everything else like I do email and IM. Facebook took an alternative approach with their popular API and tried to create a more open platform for developers. The result was that, when I first checked it out, there were tools for doing almost everything with my FaceBook account. I often didn't even have to visit the facebook site! MySpace and Facebook have both come a long way since then. MySpace is certainly more popular and successful, but I think Facebook is still better from developer's standpoint. MySpace has followed their lead a bit, and it would be great to see them do more in that area. Then, I might be a MySpace fanbois. Maybe...
I was talking from a performance point of view (the point of this thread.) Unique visitors, page impressions etc. Frankly, I think they both suck. Facebook sucks a little bit less.
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
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I was talking from a performance point of view (the point of this thread.) Unique visitors, page impressions etc. Frankly, I think they both suck. Facebook sucks a little bit less.
cheers, Paul M. Watson.
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