I disagree that the basic difference is hardware. If you see the hardware
capability of mid-range Intel Servers, they are not down on unix boxes. You
can have SSA disks on Intel. You can have SMP, multiple I/O buses and RAS.
The problem is the OS itself.

In the small, Unix scales better because of its own architecture that
defines a file abstraction for anything. Basically, it extends its API to a
whole lot of devices, and if you need more resources, just "open" another
file, for devices, memory, paging, etc.

NT has serious problems of scalability. Memory management isn't as good and
often leave leaks. That's one reason why you have to reboot it more often.
Have you heard of the 49-day patch ? Microsoft launched a patch for NT to
correct a bug : system crash after 49 days of continuous use. Nobody
had ever complained about it ... ok, silly joke.

And the final point : why is it that Oracle stated that Oracle 8i on Linux
is at least twice faster than on NT ? Surely not because of the hardware
...

best regards,
Rodrigo

>AIX, and UNIX in general, will beat NT simply because of the hardware.
>The midrange and larger (and even some smaller) UNIX machines will have
>multiple PCI busses. But the biggest speed-up (beyond CPU speed and
>RAM) is SSA for the disk.
>Steffan
>"Louie, James" wrote:
>>
>> We had an NT ADSM server, then we moved to an AIX server when it ran
>> steam. We had a 2 CPU Compaq Proliant 6500, dual 100Mb Ethernet cards
>> 640MB RAM and lots of disk backing up close to 100 NT server clients
>> When it was in operation, I saw that it used lots of CPU and not much
>> memory. IBM said that the NT server did not scale well past 2 CPUs, s
>> don't waste any money there. This was attached to a STK9710 w/10 DLT7
>> drives. We had 3 SCSI cards in the server attaching to the DLTs. The
>> bottlenecks will be your network and I/O (disk and tape). Speed those
>> you can. We eventually went with an AIX server because the Intel plat
>> we were using just could not go any faster. We're seeing at least 2-3
>> performance now. (I'm not saying that you should look at AIX now, NT
>> suit you perfectly.)
>>
>> James Louie
>> Nabisco
>>
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Jordan, Chris (ELS) [mailto:c.jordan AT ELSEVIER.CO DOT UK]
>> > Sent: Thursday, August 19, 1999 12:37 PM
>> > To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
>> > Subject: Re: ADSM Bottleneck
>> >
>> >
>> > We have an NT Intel "building block" server that consists of:
>> >
>> > 2 x 400 MHz CPUs
>> > 512 MB Memory
>> > 2 x 3 disks (9.1GB) mirrored for Op Sys and database
>> > 24 disks (9.1GB) for the disk cache.
>> > Attached to a DLT Tape library - 4 drives and 84 slots.
>> >
>> > We haven't fully loaded it yet to need a second building
>> > block - but it
>> > seems to be the disk for the database that is going to become
>> > the bottle
>> > neck first.
>> >
>> > Cheers, Chris
>> >
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Forgosh, Seth [mailto:sforgosh AT TIAA-CREF DOT ORG]
>> > Sent: 19 August 1999 16:37
>> > To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
>> > Subject: ADSM Bottleneck
>> >
>> >
>> > We are about to spec out a new ADSM server running NT on the
>> > Intel platform.
>> > We are interested in opinions of what are the main
>> > bottlenecks for ADSM
>> > performance. For instance, would adding multiple processors incr
>> > performance (especially ADSM DB) or is memory more important.
>> > Thanks in
>> > advance.
>> > Seth Forgosh
>> >