Henry Baltazar and Timothy Dyck of eWEEK report on the surprising results of eWeek Labs' Web server benchmark, in which Red Hat's Tux 2.0 webserver was compared with the venerable Apache. Baltazar and Dyck write . . .

“In most cases, a public benchmark is really nothing more than a transaction race where bragging rights and platform pride are the prizes. But every so often, a revolutionary performance breakthrough comes to the forefront during a test.”

“In the case of eWeek Labs' Web server benchmark, Red Hat Inc.'s Tux 2.0 Web server running on a Linux 2.4 kernel has taken performance far beyond what was previously possible and blazes the way for future Web servers built on the same architecture.”

“Working closely with Dell Computer's Performance Engineering group (the original group that first published Tux's amazing performance benchmarks on the SPECWeb 99 benchmark) a test performed at eWeek Labs found that Tux was able to perform nearly three times faster than current Web server mainstay Apache (12,792 transactions per second vs. 4,602 tps) when running a mix of dynamic and static Web content . . .”

“Tux's amazing speeds, even on low-end hardware, strongly validate its unusual design: First, Tux puts Web server code into the kernel and reads Web pages directly from Linux's kernel-mode file system cache for speed; second, Tux handles high numbers of connections very efficiently by using a small pool of worker threads instead of using one worker process per connection (as Apache does); third, Tux uses its own high-performance thread-scheduling algorithm to minimize the impact of disk activity.”

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