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Microsoft Operating Systems BSD

Hotmail about to collapse under load 492

Posted by Nik from the well,-probably dept.
An AC submitted this interesting tidbit from those folks over at NetCraft. To quote from the page: "HotMail has commenced its much awaited migration to a Microsoft operating system. Some Windows 2000 machines have recently been moved into the load balancing pool, with currently between 90-95% of requests being served by the established FreeBSD/Apache platform, and 5-10% from Windows 2000." This is not the first time MS are believed to have attempted this (but I'd appreciate hard evidence confirming that, instead of the more normal rumours and whispers).
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Hotmail about to collapse under load More

Hotmail about to collapse under load

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  • I think they're ready for it... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My experience with web serving with Win2K is that it's stable -- if you don't do anything really special with it. Given, however, that Microsoft has been working with Win2K for many months now (and therefore should be done doing anything specail to it), I suspect that their cluster dedicated to HotMail will be fairly stable -- why else would they have let people tell them "if Win2K is so great, why aren't you using it for Hotmail?" for the past 6 months? I suspect that they're as ready as they can be for the switch.

    Of course, this is also the same company that let their domain registration of Hotmail.com expire, so saying "as ready as they can be" might not be saying much...

    Quite frankly, I'll be much more impressed when they try this with search.microsoft.com -- last I looked, it was served by Apache.

  • MS has asked, but they haven't tried (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ah, the joy of posting anonymously. Microsoft has, since they first bought Hotmail, asked/demanded that they migrate to NT. However, the people in charge have known better. Many of the original Hotmail managers who knew better, however, have either moved on to better positions in other companies, or moved out of Hotmail into positions of responsbility over larger areas (like all of MS networking, etc).

    No idea if this is why they're trying now, or if its just their corporate people coming down harder, but either way, I'm pretty sure this is the first time they've really tried.
  • For the Info, you can customize the header Apache returns when you send him a request. Go on Netcraft and check www.real.com. They are running Apache on Linux but as you can see that's not what they show on their Apache headers.

    Actually, real.com is running on Roxen [roxen.com], not Apache.
    Your point remains valid however, as they are having it return a custom identifier as you described.
    --
  • You are wrong. :)
    -
    Most larger email systems use a so-called "2nd generation" MTA like qmail. Sendmail is basically monolithic and qmail is actually about 5 different processes. Processes for sending mail, recieving mail, etc. Postfix, Exim, and a few other also fall into this category, I believe. Postfix has been showing up in several Linux distro's due to their friendlier license then qmail. Source for Qmail is availible, but making changes availible in a commercial product has issues.
    -
    There's nothing really wrong with sendmail, it's just if you want to move LOTS of mail something a bit smaller and leaner is better.

    Kashani, occasional qmail flunky
  • I would bet Hotmail sells the email addresses. Sure, I've given out my email address to several porn sites, but I've always been very sure to uncheck the box that says, "Subscribe me to the prono mailing list." (Everytime, I swear!) And still... I get porn spam! Egad, it must be Microsoft selling my Hotmail email addy....
  • Apparently the humor of my post was lost on you... (read the bazillion posts before mine, people saying, "How did I get porn spam, I don't visit porno sites...")
  • OK, I'm all for Linux advocacy and stuff, but this is just plain silly. First of all, while you *can* run 40,000 instances of Linux on one mainframe, it doesn't mean it will be very useful. If you take the processing power of a mainframe and divide it by 40,000, you'll see that each virtual Linux box is much slower than a 386. (Mainframe is not THAT powerful! It's just got very fast I/O subsystem. Other than that, it's more or less an ordinary 12-CPU box.)

    Secondly, a cluster of x86 boxes will be an order of magnitude cheaper than a cluster of mainframes with equal processing power. Note that a single mainframe will NOT be able to handle all of the load. Ever heard of Beowulf? The guys that built Avalon (a Beowulf cluster of Alpha boxes) claim that it was over 6 times cheaper than a supercomputer from SGI with comparable performance.
    ___
  • Just a little historical perspective (as I recall it, correct me if I'm wrong):

    Hotmail was NOT originally created by MS. When it was originally created, it was built on non Microsoft *nix type systems. Microsoft bought hotmail and shortly afterward investigated moving it to NT4.

    During their testing they had a hard time getting NT4 boxes to handle the load of hotmail. I'd also say it is safe to assume that the existing hotmail code was written for, and tuned for *nix and not NT, meaning they would need at least some (and probably extensive) re-write to run well on NT. They probably could have moved it to NT at considerable expense, but given the cost and difficulty they decided to leave hotmail as-is. Even though leaving hotmail on *nix systems cost them some face (even MS couldn't get a large scale site to run on NT4), they still decided it would be better to leave well enough alone (for the time being).

    Now they have a better (?) version of their flagship OS, and are taking another stab at moving hotmail onto their servers.

    Not much of this seems very surprising..
  • Seriously, not just to bash M$ (but that's always fun in its own easy way :-), how much of this is simply because it isn' necessarily compatible with NT4 and its multiple service packs? In other words, was NT 4 stable when it first started? Will W2K be more unstable in 2 or 3 years?

    I don't run NT myself, in fact, I got my job partly because my resume said "No Windows experience and I don't want it" and the job ad said (in all caps) "MICROSOFT PROGRAMMERS NEED NOT APPLY". So this really is a curiosity question, with about as much serious content as wondering whether snakes prefer to eat rodents tail first or head first.

    --
  • How in the hell is your KDE using 180megs? are you sure you aren't counting used buffer memory against the totals? Also comparing the memory usage across the architectures is iffy at best. MSoft OS's don't usually report in the basic tools whats really being used (since they don't report caches).

    ---
    Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...
  • While we can laugh at Microsoft for trying to use the wrong tool for the job, its a great way to for them to test their own software.

    Programming is always more efficient when the programmers use their own product. Isn't this why linux is where it is today?

    Too bad no one at Microsoft tried living with the paper clip for two months before plaguing the world with it.

    This shouldn't be a slashdot post, it should be a daily occurance.
  • "Collapse under load" what are you talking about? Any chance of a link to anything that might substantiate that...?
  • come, now. many sites, including yahoo, have been taken out with ddos attacks. though a /. attack would not be quite as bad as a `real' ddos, they are quite similar.

    =--- - - .
  • At one point, my sister created a Hotmail account. Being a bit of a technophobe, she only gave it to two friends in meatspace. After a month, it was full of spam - for pr0n sites. I have no idea how she managed to get onto pornspammers lists, but she did. Given that I doubt my sister is interested in looking at "cum-guzzling bitches" it seems a bit odd that she'd get that junk.

    I had the same problem. I created a throwaway account for use on a particular mailing list (I wanted to be able to post stuff semi-anonymously) but never actually did anything with it.

    A couple of months later I come back to Hotmail and I had 70 porn ads in it. I never gave anyone the address, let alone used it for anything!

    Did anyone actually look at Hotmail's Terms of Service to determine wahther or not they reserve the right to sell your Hotmail account?

    Jay (=
  • Ah, you got the Apache servers that they changed the "Server:" line on to say "Microsoft-IIS/5.0" :-)
  • >
    > ... didn't happen, and stop spreading the rumor
    > that it did ...
    >

    Hotmail did, indeed, try to migrate to NT. Two
    things happened:
    1. The engineers they hired to do the move said
    that it could not be done, and that the systems
    just could not stand up to the load.
    2. The Unix admins threatened to quit on the spot
    if they continued to threaten to move Hotmail to
    NT. All of Microsoft's significant ISP services (Hotmail and WebTV, of note) run on Solaris. Hotmail uses some FreeBSD. Linux and FreeBSD, as well as NT, comprise some of the tools people use
    on the backend for development and such, but the
    infrastructure of both sites is primarily Solaris.

    Note that all this information can be found easily by public means, so I'm divulging no information by saying this.
  • Well, if your mailing list was archived publically, then your address might have been picked up by spam-spiders or whatever.

    I've seen mailing list programs which archive the messages changing myname@example.com to "myname at example dot com", which should be a decent deterant. I've also seen (in HTMLGen for Python, though I'm sure it's used elsewhere) replacing random letters from the email address with the HTML escape sequence, so that it looks perfectly normal to a person using a web browser but as text it's not a valid email (which will work until spider programs replace the escape sequences, which perhaps they do already).

    I wrote a newsgroup-email-sucker-thing one time (for educational purposes only!); it was I think 16 lines of Python, not coded very well, a single thread of execution, and it still nabbed around 6000 addresses per hour (extrapolated; I didn't run it that long).

  • Check your internet connection. This edit page opened in about 1 second. I can't tell you in advance how long it'll take to post, but I'll reply to myself if it's over a minute :-)
  • Before we all start saying "Hotmail's going to die! Win2K can't handle the load!", let's wait and see what happens. We may be surprised: perhaps MS has finally started getting it right. Perhaps Win2K *can* handle the load. Right now, we simply don't know.

    What we do know is that the Apache/BSD combo is very capable of doing the job. We can use that as evidence to convince the pointy-haired types of the validity of Linux/BSD/Apache as reliable tools, even though they're free.

    I'm very interested to see the end results. Can Win2K handle the load? Is its reliability finally on par with *NIX? Will Marsha ever love again? (Uh... nevermind...)

    I am a huge fan of Linux and BSD. I hate the crap that comes out of Redmond. However, I'm also a firm believer in "the best tool for the job." If Linux is the best, use it. If Windows does what you need, use it.

    Those of us in the IT field aren't being paid for our prejudices for or against particular operating systems. We're paid to get the stuff to work right at the highest level of efficiency and reliability.

    I'm very interested to see what the end results of this move are going to be.

  • Hotmail about to collapse under load
    I know other people have complained about the headline, but jeez guys, what kind of crummy and misleading sensationalism is that? Not to mention wishful thinking. Grow up.

  • Yeah! And when they move the network to mostly Windows machines, let's all hit www.hotmail.com [hotmail.com] and sign up for an account -- all at the same time. Then we'll see just how well Windows 2000 can stand the heat! :-)

  • First, you can look at these numbers two ways - either W2K is better -or- the productivity numbers come from it being worse. For example, "Since we installed W2K, our productivity has increased 5%. We have found that the web browser crashes so often our sales force spends 5% less time surfing the web."

    These numbers are very meaningless to me. They remind me of ads for things like the Splitfire spark plug that "increases your gas mileage 15%!". Funny thing is that your gas mileage varies by 15% constantly. In other words, snake oil.

  • Mainframe is not THAT powerful! It's just got very fast I/O subsystem.

    Yes, and just what do you suppose the machines in a web/email site like Hotmail spend most of their time doing? Fast Fourier transforms? I don't think so.
  • Where 100% uptime is critical, you get two mainframes and put them in different locations, obviously.

    I've seen mainframe datacenters supplied with power from two different transformer substations, and with a roomful of battery backups and a standby generator, just in case of potential power outages.

    I've worked one place where a key corporate system was hosted on a Sun Enterprise 1000 system, or rather two of them, one in Denver, one in Dallas, with the database replicated between the two via a dedicated OC3 line.

    When you get a situation like that described at Hotmail where you've got admins employed full-time just assembling new boxes and adding them to the clusters to keep up with growth (to say nothing of running around rebooting/repairing failed boxes), you're in a situation where the savings on admin costs alone will pay for another mainframe.
  • I vaguely recall that, when Hotmail had a partial outage and customer data loss a couple of months back, I jokingly commented that they were trying to cut over to Windows again.

    Maybe it wasn't a joke. The news stories quoted an automated response from the overworked complaint desk, and the gist of the response was that "we're doing something that's going to improve your service".

    Did anyone hear the cause of the outtage and data loss? Does anyone know when they started putting W2K in?

    --
  • The real news in the Netcraft article, which no one seems to be mentioning, is that Linux now runs 30% of the WWW.

    Moreover, that 30% makes Linux #1. So far as I know, this is the first time this fact has been announced to the public. (And the public might well be surprised, considering how hard Gartner and IDC have been trying to play down Linux's successes in server space.)

    Netcraft also reports that the agregate of all types of Windows runs 28.3% of the Web; Solaris, 16.3%; the ever-popular "other" runs 23.6%; and a couple of percent are left over as "unknown".

    Hopefully they will now start reporting it over time, so that we can get nice trend plots like we do for Apache.

    --
  • Remind me again why having free memory is a good thing? You pay lots of money for fast RAM, then... don't use it? The reason you have memory is so you can do things with it. It's the sign of a good operating system to use all the resources available. Using spare memory to cache graphics objects (which I'm guessing KDE does) is a good use of free memory. Bloat is different than resource usage.

  • Re:uhm (Score:2)

    by Xenu ( 21845 )
    The problem is when your customers have trouble using your web site because of flakey software. I see far more weird errors on www.microsoft.com than on other web sites. They seem to have a policy of using all of the latest Microsoft bells and whistles, whether they work reliably or not.
  • I read the WSJ about once a week and I've seen quite a lot of tech-oriented articles right on page 1. Napster has gotten a lot of coverage lately (obvious business impact there). I've also seen several articles about Outlook security holes that have been pretty harsh against MS. I'm pretty sure they put an article about the backdoor in HotMail a few months ago on page 1. They definately have good tech reporting because Slashdot links stories to WSJ.com all the time.

    -B
  • Wow, you have one whole data point. That's enough to draw all sorts of conclusions from.
  • You are afc, and I want my $5.
  • I gaurentee this is not what is happening. How do i know? I work for Hotmail. I'm on the front lines. I know what's going on. And this is not what is happening. That i gaurentee.

    I am not sure where Slashdot got this, but the title is completly misleading. There is a transition of SOME of the servers from BSD to Win2k, but that load is stable, and is not a source of problems. It is a gradual change, and a hotmail user won't even notice the difference.

    at least get your headline right.


    ----------------
    "All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
  • Geez, what, is everybody on Slashdot a programmer? Where are all the SAs and NAs? Hotmail has been going beserk lately, and Microsoft has been contacting most of the major providers to try and dampen their mail to Hotmail. Hotmail has actually been bulk rejecting mail from some of the largest mailing lists on the net recently. New York's Silicon Alley Daily [siliconalleydaily.com] has a story about how they shut down all mails from 24/7 media's Exactis. Exactis is one of the largest mailing list companies, so all of their customers (including SAD) were affected. The latest attempt to migrate Hotmail has been a nightmare, just like the last time.
  • Very shortly after MS acquired Hotmail, they attempted to migrate it to Windows NT Server 4. It collapsed spectacularly under the very heavy load that Hotmail gets, forcing MS to restore the original servers running BSD and/or Solaris. It was rather embarassing for them.

    At least this time they're taking it slow, a few servers at a time, rather than just pulling the plug on the old boxes. Before we write off Hotmail, let's see how Win2K handles it. Everyone I've talked to who's used Win2K has found it to be significantly faster and more reliable than NT4. They may be able to pull this off - I suspect these 5%-10% will be used to work out the kinks before migrating the whole service.

  • It's a very long, painful debate on the OpenBSD forums - go to the archives there and have a read.

    Basically, Theo and his team auditted the OpenBSD version of sendmail and are happy with it security-wise. Add that to the fact that it's the industry standard and they're happy to keep it.

    Also, qmail has a very very restrictive license that the BSD people are probably not happy with (they aren't really allowed to patch the source code and distribute it as 'qmail' in a binary package, which isn't acceptable).

    Still, the first thing I do on my OpenBSD installs is to kill sendmail and install qmail from ports :-)

  • At first sight, many readers (myself included) probably thought the title was a stab against BSD.

    Actually, I think the title meant that Hotmail is going to collapse under its load soon, ("about to"), since it's switching to Win2k.

    ahhhh. Cute humor, too bad it was badly phrased ;)

    Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)

  • Well, what if it's a really big point? Then it could be a circle, which you could conclusions from, no?

    OK, maybe I'm too bored at work right now...

  • This definately applies. I get the feeling that the default NTFS security is so lax on NT4 and Win2k because Microsoft ITG (Internal Technology Group, what most people would call MIS) formats all the desktop PC's with FAT (NT4) or FAT32 (Win2k) and gives the employee admin access on it.

    There's just no internal pressure to create system that's perfectly usable by a non-admin.

  • There has been a mixture of facts and distortions in these threads.

    Hotmail has several different kinds of machines. For purposes of this article, there are three kinds:

    1) Solaris boxes used for storing the email, basically huge local file servers

    2) A mix of NT and FreeBSD Intel boxes used as "front doors", i.e. the things that render the pages.

    3) FreeBSD Intel boxes for the rest (the plumbing of the email application, ad server, incoming email, etc.)

    The article, I assume, is talking about the front doors. This is not the bulk of Hotmail, although they are the ones that handle the connections (after the load balancer, of course).

    Hotmail represents a lot of practical learning about how to maintain and build scale. They add clusters in units of groups of the three types of machines noted above. This simplifies management and expenses, as well as technical issues.

    Microsoft is, of course, interested in moving the front doors to Windows 2000 as a scalability and management test. They have run Windows NT 4 on them in the past and learned from that. I doubt the interior machines of Hotmail will use Windows 2000 without a significant and extremely costly redesign -- unlike the front doors, there is significant non-portable code involved.

    My information comes from having done an analysis of Hotmail at Microsoft, where I was chief architect until 1999.
  • I ran the same experiment, but used www.hotmail.com for the hostname rather than the one that you selected (how did you come up with that one?)

    You're scanning the login page - he's scanning the cluster which handles the inbox, composition, posting, etc etc. The actual email servers.

    Simon
  • You only get redirected after login; and that "one address" (the law one) would appear to be running both Apache and IIS SIMULTANEOUSLY depending on when you ping it. So it's obviously a subcluster.

    Simon
  • I setup a hotmail account long ago just to get my /. login. I've never posted that address anywhere else, and I rarely even check the mail there. But I generally have 20-30 spams in 6 months. How can that be? Either /. is leaking addresses or spammers are trying names at random.

    Or you got a "recycled" account with the name already on a spammers list. Or your email address happens to be one someone else uses as a "mangled" name, etc, etc
  • I started a new yahoo account to never use... 6 months later (never posting it anywhere or using it) I had ~10-20 spams/month (total over 100)... good stuff!

    --
  • Get your facts straight. That's not the MSN homepage. That's the host that carries MSN members homepages.

    www.msn.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
  • I use my hotmail account a lot (to protect my work account) and have lately noticed a number of SPAMs to me, from me. I know the headers are forged, but that's abuse!
  • Geez how do you fit that printer inside your PC box.

    No please don't take printers. An off the shelf HP laserjet 6 caused the machine to lock up every third print job. An off the shelf DELL with an ATI rage card randomly rebooted itself several times a day. Eventually I was able to get beta drivers for both and now it just randomly reboots every other day or so if you are lucky. I am still waiting for tested, signed officially OKed drivers from DELL or ATI but it might take a couple of months.
    Oh yea installing Interbase Version 6.0 also killed the system!. The OS let the installer overwrite a crucial system DLL. WhooHoo all it takes to take down W2K is a DLL with a wrong timestamp.

    Nothing changes the same old crap in a new packaging. I really should know by now what to expect from MS.

    A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.

  • Unfortunately Linux can work with more hardware. Most of the pieces in a modern machine don't have windows 2K drivers and the list of actually tested and signed drivers is miniscule. If you are running a modern PC you are much more likely to get a working and stable driver for linux then windows 2K.

    The good news is that after 20 years of inoovation microsft was finally able to include a telnet server in windows. It just shows what innovation can do.

    A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.

  • It takes microsoft to sell a technological improvement as "increasing sales force productivity". I wonder if when we upgrade here, our sales productivity will go up too :)
  • Microsoft SHOULD buy back their shares of Xenix, and run freeBSD on that.

    I'm an idiot. I meant to say run HOTMAIL on that, not FreeBSD. My mind gets numb at 5pm.
  • Microsoft SHOULD buy back their shares of Xenix, and run freeBSD on that.

    [snicker]

    Or they could mix it with Windows 2003 (Code named WinOSX) and then build a special API called.. Saqua to beef up their GUI.

    Either way, buying back Xenix would be a great move for MS. (-:
  • I don't know if it's related, but recently I've been getting a HELL of a lot more "Oops, server encountered an internal server error" and "404 - Document not found" errors when attempting to access my hotmail account. I only use Hotmail for my CS Clan stuff, but I check it a couple of times a day. During the past week or so, ever 2nd access (either login in, attempting to view/reply to a message, moving mail, etc) results in some form of error being spewed at me. Prior to this I had no problems. Coincidence? I think not.
  • Yea, I had bought Opera for Windows. As for the sites I visit I mostly go to bebits, betips, benews, and Be's developer website.

  • I can verify this (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:40AM (#888109)
    I worked with Hotmail and Microsoft for a while and can tell you they've been working on getting everything to Windows for quite a while. They were working on designing just about everything so they could port it over, however hotmail has a *LOT* of proprietary code, 'databases', servers, meta-servers, frontdoor code, etc, so it has obviously taken some time. I expect the change to happen soon.

  • From the horse's mouth: (Score:3)

    by talks_to_birds ( 2488 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:09AM (#888110) Homepage Journal
    Dogfood [netcraft.com]

    "HotMail has commenced its much awaited migration to a Microsoft operating system. Some Windows 2000 machines have recently been moved into the load balancing pool, with currently between 90-95% of requests being served by the established FreeBSD/Apache platform, and 5-10% from Windows 2000. The Hotmail site infrastructure is enormous, and even if everything runs smoothly, a migration will likely take several weeks."

    I'm not sure why several people have gone off on /. for attributing this story to an AC, saying that it's FUD, or that /. is about to collapse under bias..

    C'mon folks, this is what Netcraft has said; /. is merely quoting them.

    Click on the link [netcraft.com] and go read it, and deal with it..

    It's about a third of the way down the page, under Around the Net

    t_t_b
    --
    I think not; therefore I ain't®

  • Re:Netcraft Result (Score:3)

    by ruud ( 7631 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:17AM (#888111) Homepage

    I went to Netcraft's site and this was the response back from a request to Hotmail.

    www.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on Windows 2000

    I am not one to jump to conclusions but something strange seems to be going on (or is it just me). Unix version of Apache on Windows 2000????

    Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this one.

    It's quite simple actually. The machine that accepts the TCP connection (the load balancer) forwards it on to one of a pool of webservers. Sometimes also called reverse proxying. Obviously the load balancer and the webservers do not need to run the same OS, as you see in this example.


    --
  • To be honest, I grabbed the hostname from somebody else's post. (Like I said -- don't know nuthin' about Microsoft's system.) I think I got that address from Spock the Vulcan's post [slashdot.org], which is a single head dump from Lynx. Also, JOKane posted [slashdot.org] saying that 6.1% of his (?) 1,000 wgets were processed by the IIS server.

    I wonder if the login server isn't different from the actual mail servers? Hotmail does, after all, immediately push you to one of their law.hotmail.msn.com servers. That was my assumption, though perhaps flawed, when I used the lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com address. Is anybody familiar with their topology?

    Anyhow, I repeated the experiment, this time on lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com [passport.com], which is the server that www.hotmail.com pushes to. My numbers there more closely matched yours:
    • 953 "Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b"
    • 47 "Microsoft-IIS/5.0"

    4.7% W2K. That's closer the the results that I'd *like* to see. :) I hope some Slashdotter knows more about MSN's load-balancing setup that we do!

    -Waldo
    -------------------

  • For $3300 it better be (Score:3)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:58AM (#888113) Homepage
    if one can install it and get it up and running quickly like a business machine should that'd be great - altho for 200 servers that comes to, mmmm, $660,000 (zowie!). If I have to start putzing around trying to trick it to work, read thick manuals, grep TechNet for workarounds and edit registry keys then I'd just rather use an open platform in the first place - at least it *worth* learning, and isn't just BG's flavor on the month that will be obsolete, useless knowledge in the next cycle - e.g., I'm glad I didn't commit much time to learning NT security domains, other than just enough to get by and get paid, now that there's a completely different system in 2K.

  • Re:Slashdot FUD (Score:3)

    by Col. Klink (retired) ( 11632 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @10:51AM (#888114)
    > their most successful net service has been running on Unix since day one.

    That's not quite true. They did attempt to convert to NT once before, but it failed under the load.

    That's the justification for the headline.

  • uhm (Score:3)

    by Blue Lang ( 13117 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:35AM (#888115) Homepage
    it doesn't say how many w2k boxes are being used to replace the BSD boxes. if they're putting in 400 w2k machines in place of 200 BSD ones, of course it will prolly work, but that isn't much of a reason for using w2k.

    --
    blue

  • NT's problem is cost, not lack of features (Score:3)

    by jetson123 ( 13128 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @03:48PM (#888116)
    NT can, of course, handle Hotmail. That's not the issue. And Microsoft has to do this if they want to appear credible at all. They also have to do it in order to figure out what is wrong with Windows 2000.

    The question is whether it's cost effective for customers to deploy Windows 2000 in that way. There are several components to the cost:

    • The Microsoft software licenses. Expensive for business customers, a non-issue for Microsoft.
    • Software licenses for 3rd party tools that plug holes. Probably also given almost freely to Microsoft by companies hoping to get acquired.
    • Hardware costs. Windows 2000, in practice, probably needs more hardware to achieve similar levels of reliability and performance as UNIX machines (I'm not talking raw hits/second).
    • Maintenance and administration costs. Windows 2000 scores very poorly in that regard in my opinion. But for a Windows-only shop like Microsoft, it's probably cheaper to go with Windows than with BSD.

    So, can it be done? Sure. And Microsoft needs to do it if they want to play at all. But it is not a convincing demonstration that it's a cost-effective solution.

    If I were to start another big web project, I'd still not pick Windows 2000--except for niche server applications, I believe it's still too expensive to license the required MS and non-MS software, and it requires too much manpower to administer. It also doesn't have any place to grow right now: a multiprocessor Xeon is it.

    Actually, it shows us one thing: the fact that Microsoft has been playing around with this for, what, three years, suggests that you can't easily create the software for a Hotmail-like service rom scratch and with complete specifications on the NT platform within that time period even if you have unlimited amounts of money and all the Windows expertise in the world. Perhaps that's the most important lesson of that exercise, and something aspiring web startups should take note of.

  • Re:Some Real Data: 79.8% Win2K (Score:3)

    by tramm ( 16077 ) <hudson@swcp.com> on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @10:52AM (#888117) Homepage
    I ran the same experiment, but used www.hotmail.com for the hostname rather than the one that you selected (how did you come up with that one?)

    My results:
    240 Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
    15 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0

    94% Apache, 6% IIS. Much closer to the 5% numbers quoted in the article.

  • Windows 2000 performance (Score:3)

    by Taral ( 16888 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:39AM (#888118) Homepage
    Although everyone here will go "it'll never work" or "it'll fail instantly", my experience with Windows 2000 is that, if properly set up, it can be quite a stable platform. We should all be watching closely, since this will be a real test to see whether Windows 2000 can meet or exceed an equivalent UNIX+Apache system.

  • Re:Bit of insight to Hotmail (Score:3)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @12:17PM (#888119) Homepage
    The system there is divided into "Clusters" each cluster having about 400 machines. There are about 12 clusters there, which mean about 4,800 machines. [...] they are having to add machines and clusters as fast as they can because of all the increased volume/new users.

    An earlier poster said something about using "the right tool for the job". Those 4800 machines are about one ninth (1/9) of the number of virtual Linux machines that an IBM S/390 can run simultaneously, and at several times the cost of that S/390.

    This isn't about the right tool for the job at all, Hotmail should be hosted on Big Iron. (To bad for MS that NT or W2K won't run on 390 hardware.) I would hope that the difference in cost (of the 4800 x86 boxes vs an S/390) is coming out of Marketing's budget. (But of course it isn't.)

  • Re:Why would it go down? (Score:3)

    by stab ( 26928 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:53AM (#888120) Homepage
    Adding nodes can only make the system faster, regardless of whether the new nodes are Windows or BSD

    Definitely not true. If the additional machines are significantly slower and/or unreliable, then you destabilise the overall quality of service of Hotmail.

    Think about it ... if 10% of the machines suddenly buckle under the load, but in such a way as to escape automatic removal, then 10% of URL requests will die mysteriously.

    This is a pretty positive move from Microsoft's point of view though - after that initial burp, they've been very careful from a system integration point of view, and seem to be quite sane about the way they are migrating to 2000 now.

  • Re:Slashdot ain't all that hot either. (Score:3)

    by synx ( 29979 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:37PM (#888121)
    Well, MySQL is MySQL, but I find its being used for many projects which I think is totally inappropriate. I mean anything above the most simple site which is done as a hobby, I think MySQL is not good enough... what happens when your RDBMS fall down go boom? I find Ramus's explination why he thinks Foreign Key's are "bad" just too funny for words (ok, not quite, but still quite funny).

    I'd like to point out that I think MySQL has a niche, but I think people are using MySQL in many places outside of that niche, and that takes away energy from more worthy projects ie: PostgreSQL.

    Yes, There are many sites I'd suggest MySQL over Oracle, but I wouldnt use MySQL for a site I was paid to do ever again.

  • Re:What the hell was that headline about (Score:3)

    by Izaak ( 31329 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:48AM (#888122) Homepage Journal
    "Collapse under load" what are you talking about? Any chance of a link to anything that might substantiate that...?

    Well, I can't speak definitively about Win2000, but I know for a fact that Windows NT can not come close to FreeBSD/Apache for web serving. I used to be a partner in a small ISP that tried to run NT/IIS... it fell over big time. We put FreeBSD and Apache on the exact same hardware and it scaled up with no problems. Dynamic content seemed to be the real problem area for NT/IIS.

    I imagine MS has made some improvements in that area with Windows 2000, but I am not about to bet MY business on it.

    Thad

  • Sendmail would crumble under that kind of load. Hotmail, rather sanely, uses qmail for outgoing deliveries. Here's the Message-ID from a mail I received from a friend who uses Hotmail:

    <20000428205548.12433.qmail@hotmail.com>

    Note the qmail part.

  • Quite frankly, I don't care how many millions of hits per second it requires to prove that IIS on NT is supposedly faster than Apache on Linux, *nix or *BSD.

    I care about stability. The fact that my Apache on Linux system doesn't crash, doesn't give in, doesn't care ... that's why I use it. So IIS can hit millions more hits per second ...then fall down. ;-)

    At least I don't have pieces to put back together.

  • Hotmail HAS tried this before (Score:3)

    by fence ( 70444 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:49AM (#888125) Homepage
    I was a consultant at an online yellow pages [uswestdex.com] company from 1998->2000.

    Our director of engineering and one of the VPs were courted by Microsoft in late 1998 or early 1999 to consider using Windows NT to serve our pages and do our directory searches.

    As evidence of Microsoft's ability to handle large loads, they were shown racks upon racks of rack-mounted NT boxes. Hundreds of boxes. The idea being that when some fall over, there are plenty to take up the load.

    Our VP was told that these machines were to be the new Hotmail servers.

    The director and VP came back to town all excited and wanted us to look into getting rid of our pesky Sun Enterprise boxes.

    About a month after they got back, we showed them an article about Microsoft's failed conversion of Hotmail to NT, and how they had to roll back to FreeBSD and Apache.

    to see how the story worked out, check out what your Directory EXpert [uswestdex.com] is using today [netcraft.com].
    ---
    Interested in the Colorado Lottery?

  • Actual Percentages (Score:3)

    by JOKane ( 78829 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:27AM (#888126)
    I used wget 1,000 times and checked the "Server" header. Only 61 of these requests were processed by IIS servers.

    This suggests that the 10% figure that's been thrown around is (from an MS standpoint) very optimistic. 5-6% seems much more reasonable.

  • Dictionary spamming (Score:3)

    by ars ( 79600 ) <<assd2> <at> <dsgml.com>> on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:01AM (#888127) Homepage
    It's called dictionary spamming. They take every combination of one or two words in the dictionary plus 0-2 digits at the start end and between every word.

    They also simply try randomly every single combination of letters and numbers, up to arround 5 letters, more then that would take too long.

    So in short, when you create a hotmail address make it long, and don't use words from the dictionary and you won't get too much spam.

  • Re:How the hell are you going to /. Hotmail? (Score:3)

    by passion ( 84900 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:03AM (#888128)

    By using those 41,500 Linux servers [slashdot.org] on one S/390 mainframe... that I bought for $45.00 - that's how :)

    Or, I could convince people to join team slashdot at distributed.net for sending ping of deaths to hotmail just as M$ finishes switching over to Winblows!

    Just me and my beowulfed slashdot community

  • Re:Here goes (Score:3)

    by Ranger Bob ( 92127 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:38AM (#888129)
    $lynx -head -dump http://lc5.law5.hotmail.passport.com/cgi-bino
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 18:37:33 GMT
    Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
    Cache-Control: no-cache
    Expires: Mon, 01 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT
    Pragma: no-cache
    Set-Cookie: BrowserTest=Success%3f; domain=.passport.com; path=/
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html

    $

  • Intel Wins! (Score:3)

    by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:32AM (#888130) Homepage Journal
    If BSD is replaced, the BSD doesn't win.

    We're all presuming that Win2k will take at least double the servers to handle the same load. So while Microsoft will claim victory, they're (presumably) paying a BUNCH of money for hardware for this showcase. So (presumably) MS doesn't win, either.

    Margins are so small on computing hardware that the the boxmaker doesn't win, either. Once upon a time, the CPU and hard drive were the only really profitable parts. Given hard drive price erosion, lately, is that list down to the CPU? In that case, Intel emerges as the only clear winner in this whole thing. (I presume these are not AMD CPUs they're fielding.)

  • I say wait and see (Score:3)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:57AM (#888131)
    The TCP/IP stack *is* different, as somebody else mentioned - I definitely notice improved performance on both the Win2000 clients and the one Win2000 server lying around. Memory usage is better too - out of 256 megs on one of the clients only 60 is being used by the system directly (that's a lot better than KDE, which eats up around 180).

    Not to say that an NT-based system will auction best the Linux and FreeBSD's of the world, but from what I've seen (despite the still extraorbinant-price MS charges) it's a pretty good, very reliable system.

  • Here goes (Score:3)

    by Spock the Vulcan ( 196989 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:35AM (#888132)
    $ lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/
    HTTP/1.1 302 Redirected
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
    Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 18:32:24 GMT
    Location: http://lc5.law5.hotmail.passport.com/cgi-bin/login

    $

  • Re:didn't they try this before? (Score:3)

    by ColdN ( 215731 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:05AM (#888133) Homepage
    After buying Hotmail in the end of 1997 they tried to run it on NT. Here's an article [unix-vs-nt.org] about it.

  • Good for them! (Score:3)

    by update() ( 217397 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:37AM (#888134) Homepage
    I'm sure there'll be a lot of sneering here but Microsoft has a good habit of eating their own dog food. In the early days of NT, they started using it internally as much as possible. They had a slow, buggy email system that lost a lot of their mail -- but NT and their servers got better. I've read that Solaris only started to get really usable when Sun forced their engineers to use it instead of SunOS.

    Maybe if Motorola hadn't gotten rid of all their Macs they'd have improved the G4 in the last year.

  • Predictions (Score:4)

    by banky ( 9941 ) <gregg.neurobashing@com> on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:02AM (#888135) Homepage Journal
    1. It will fail miserably, and the BSD community will cry *SEE! WE'RE BETTER!* and it will disappear in the mists of time. How many MCSE's do you know that talk openly about the previous Hotmail efforts? None, that I know, anyway.
    Or,
    2. It will succeed, tremendously, and then MS will use it as a massive PR campaign, how they replaced the "superior" BSD. The other side (thats us, I guess) will grumble "yeah, with double the number of machines/many times the cost/lots of effort/etc" and we'll go back to telling the boss that its NT and not Samba.
    Or,
    3. It will be a partial success, MS will Service Pack and Hotfix away, and both sides will claim victory, anyway.

    But you already knew that.

  • Data point (Score:4)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:35AM (#888136)
    I setup a hotmail account long ago just to get my /. login. I've never posted that address anywhere else, and I rarely even check the mail there. But I generally have 20-30 spams in 6 months. How can that be? Either /. is leaking addresses or spammers are trying names at random.

    Anyway, back ontopic: I just went and tried to get in. It took SEVERAL seconds to load each page. That's slower than I've ever seen it. And don't tell me it's the Slashdot Effect--something the size of hotmail should handle that.
    --

  • Re:Slashdot ain't all that hot either. (Score:4)

    by synx ( 29979 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @12:08PM (#888137)
    Consider it a failure of MySQL ;-)

    heh, yes, I'm rabidly anti-mysql, and after studying the mysql docs for many years and seeing how the mysql guys do things, I've decided they are fucked in the head to put it mildly. They've decided that 20 years+ of RDBMS research is just plain wrong and decided that table-level locks is the way to go and that transactions are not a good way to do things. Not to mention that foreign keys are just a hassle...

    I wouldnt mind so much except everyone's pushing MySQL as a oracle-replacement! I mean jeez, sure its fast... as long as you keep your concurrency low...

    which brings me to the last point, slashdot is slow because they're using mysql, the table concurrency is killing them... they used to generate the static-comment page once a minute with a little daemon thingy because they couldnt get performance from multiple-readers and multiple-writers to the same table.

    FUCK!

    Its like the last 20 years of good research and hard work hasn't ever happened... the multiple-readers/writers with good performance problem has been licked so many times, that its just sad to see software which still cant get it right... ;-(

    ok.

    bye for now.
  • I've seen a couple of comments here suggesting that Hotmail be slashdotted. How the hell are you going to accomplish this? How many users is Hotmail up to now? Last I heard it was over 40 million....how do you figure the couple of hundred thousand (that's being VERY generous) /. readers are even going to make Hotmail's servers even hiccup? You'd have about as much luck as /.-ing Yahoo...

  • Netcraft Result (Score:4)

    by HoserEh ( 64182 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:52AM (#888139)
    I went to Netcraft's site and this was the response back from a request to Hotmail.

    www.hotmail.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b on Windows 2000

    I am not one to jump to conclusions but something strange seems to be going on (or is it just me). Unix version of Apache on Windows 2000????

    Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this one.

  • Re:Gimme a break. (Score:4)

    by bad-badtz-maru ( 119524 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @11:05AM (#888140) Homepage
    =====
    2.) NT (not to mention 2k) can handle just as many hits as Solaris, or any other Unix platform. This has been shown time and time again, but people seem to like to ignore facts and concentrate on a three year old story about poorly written back end code
    =====

    This is flat out untrue. NT particularly has, time and time again, shown itself to have a feeble TCP stack that buckles under load. I am not talking about the "lets slam it with a zillion connections for 15 minutes" tests. Show me a high trafficked NT box that has been up for longer than 60 days, particularly prior to SP6a. The Microsoft solution is clustering, that way when one of the machines craps out after being up for a week, it can be rebooted without affecting site availability. The NT stack (Win 2K inclusive) is just now, within the last 12 months, starting to achieve acceptable levels of reliability. I guess it's better late than never, but don't act like the reputation is unwarranted.

    maru

  • The Real Problem With Switching (Score:4)

    by Pinball Wizard ( 161942 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:06AM (#888141) Homepage Journal
    It amazes me to see all the comparisons between NT and BSD and between IIS and Apache. I've used all of the above and yes, whatever BSD/Apache can do, so can NT/IIS. You probably need 5X as much processor speed and RAM to do the same things, but Windows & IIS can still pretty much do the same work as BSD and Apache.

    The real problem IMHO is that Microsoft has nothing that even remotely compares to Sendmail. Without a world-class SMTP server(and Sendmail is the only one that I know of) I just don't see how they could handle a project of this magnitude.

    I know there is a Sendmail for NT, but is it as solid and reliable as the UNIX version? My experience working with SMTP on NT tells me it wouldn't be, because it doesn't integrate with the OS as nicely as it does with UNIX. Correct me if I'm wrong.

  • Percentages (Score:4)

    by SnoopDobbyDobb ( 216351 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:33AM (#888142)
    I'm willing to bet that 5-10% of the mail doesn't get through! ;)

  • The Register have it (Score:5)

    by HeUnique ( 187 ) <hetz-home AT cobol2java DOT com> on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:37AM (#888143) Homepage
    Here is the Link [theregister.co.uk]
  • I ran the following shell script:

    #!/bin/bash
    i=1
    while [ "$i" -lt 253 ]
    do
    lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >> /var/tmp/hotmail
    let i="$i"+1
    done

    I got the following results:
    • 202 "Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b"
    • 798 "Microsoft-IIS/5.0"
    Disclaimer: I know nothing about Microsoft's load-balancing setup, or if I skewed the results in any way as a result of my choice of server. So I reproduce all data here.

    -Waldo
    -------------------

  • Slashdot ain't all that hot either. (Score:5)

    by DHartung ( 13689 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:31AM (#888145) Homepage
    I wouldn't be so smug: Slashdot just spent 92 seconds opening this edit page. Before that I waited almost three minutes for the article page with comments to load. And before that, I was surfing in directly to a specific single comment from an external link -- that never opened at all. I finally gave up on that window.

    I'm sure Linux/Apache (or whatever you guys are running on over here, I don't follow that gossip) does have an overall stability edge over Redmond product, but NT was never the joke it's made out to be around here and 2000 is even more competitive.
    ----

  • Re:uhm (Score:5)

    by Ralph Wiggam ( 22354 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:16AM (#888146) Homepage
    It's a risky PR move. As it stands, geeks laugh at them because a site that should be the flagship of the MSN empire doesn't run MS software. But then geeks laugh at them anyway.

    If/when they move to Win2K (I would assume Datacenter, does anyone know for sure?), and it works, then the marketing folks can point at it and say, "HotMail runs Win2K and it will surely work for your smaller site". The danger is there because the whole site could just crumble if Win2K isn't up to the task. If that happens, mainstream press like the Wall Street Journal will run front page articles saying that Win2K choked in the face of major hits. That damage could be irreperable. I know the the adoption of 2000 has been modest (to put it nicely). This could be a very important move for MS.

    -B

  • This might not be a bad thing... (Score:5)

    by AdamHaun ( 43173 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:40AM (#888147) Journal
    If it proves that Win2k and BSD can cooperate in the same environment, even temporarily. Think about it. All along we've been trying to convince businesses to introduce Linux/BSD into their computing environments. What better ammunition to use on them than this?

    "But boss, Microsoft is doing it..."

  • "Collapse under load" (Score:5)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:40AM (#888148)
    Am I reading the right page, because I don't see anything about Hotmail about to collapse under load. Can we please try to stay away from catchy but misleading news titles?

  • Gimme a break. (Score:5)

    by CoolAss ( 62578 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @10:07AM (#888149)
    Let's get some facts straight.

    1.) The reason Hotmail crapped out the first time in 1997 on NT was not because it couldn't handle the 10mil + users, but because the software was written in a way that was not happy on NT. In fact, the software was designed by the same people who designed the original back end code for the Solaris version of Hotmail. Basically, they just ported their code, that hardly ever works right.

    2.) NT (not to mention 2k) can handle just as many hits as Solaris, or any other Unix platform. This has been shown time and time again, but people seem to like to ignore facts and concentrate on a three year old story about poorly written back end code.

    3.) The reason they are doing it step by step (as in not just going, BOOM... all 20mil users on Win2k now,) is for debugging reasons. If a few thousand accounts get screwed, that's much easier to fix than a few million.

    There are MANY sites on the net that get far more traffic than hotmail (the MSN homepage for instance) and they handle the load just fine. Doesn't that make you think?

    It's not the number of *accounts* that matters, it's the number of simultaneous users.

  • Slashdot FUD (Score:5)

    by Kook9 ( 69585 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:43AM (#888150)

    There is nothing related here to justify the headline. Pure FUD. I can understand the move on Microsoft's part though -- it's got to stick in their craw that their most successful net service has been running on Unix since day one. I wonder if they expect any benefits (besides marketing) from the "upgrade"?

    While I'm on the topic of misleading Win2000 figures, allow me to quote Microsoft's latest full-page newspaper ad:

    "When all the numbers are in, we expect Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional to help increase sales-force productivity by about 5%, while reducing IT costs by over 12%."

    That means nothing, of course, since the numbers aren't in. Wouldn't expect them to wait, though.

    Kook9 out.

    Once all the results are in, I expect to be heralded the greatest lover on the planet.

  • not that it's the best, but.... (Score:5)

    by Kailden ( 129168 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:36AM (#888151) Journal
    From what I have seen, Win2000 is not your father's NT. I've had lots of trouble keeping windows NT running my web apps, but windows 2000 seems more stable. I still have my doubts about it being better than any unix derivative, and so I moving all my code to platform independence, and it will probably end up on AIX (I am trying to get some linux/FreeBSD boxen up and running, but I have to clear off the servers running NT right now. (there are too many other employees who readily jump into the easy but proprietary trap where I work))

  • Come on, people, this is a Good Thing. (Score:5)

    by Chiasmus_ ( 171285 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:46AM (#888152) Journal
    What better way could there possibly be to test how a product holds up under high stress than to attach it to a giant e-mail network, first attempting to take 5% of the load, and then slowly incrementing it to see if and when it will choke?

    And if you don't particularly want to be a beta tester, maybe you shouldn't use a giant, unruly, insecure, slow, free e-mail account as your primary mail provider. Sheesh.

    As much as most of us hate Microsoft, this experiment can only do harm to hotmail. It can't really do harm to the software being tested, and it might actually end up improving it.

  • Re:uhm (Score:5)

    by egore ( 212436 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:49AM (#888153)
    Has anyone stopped to think that it's a really good thing that Microsoft uses a Microsoft server platform for all of their servers whether or not it's the right tool for the job? If you think about it, what better way is there to improve your OS than to start using it on a large scale. Microsoft is smart enough to realize that, if they want people to use Win2k for e-mail servers, they should use it for an e-mail server as well. That way, in making it a great e-mail server for themselves, everyone else benefits because MS will be making their product that much better for that task. MS has the right approach here, IMHO.

    Just for the record, I would not mind seeing MS use more of Linux because they can definately learn some things from Unix-derived OSes (like Linux and *BSD and Unix itself).

    - Alex

  • Why would it go down? (Score:5)

    by wadetemp ( 217315 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:44AM (#888154)
    The story, as posted, said that Microsoft has moved machines into its load-balancing pool. It made no mention of removing the BSD machines. Adding nodes can only make the system faster, regardless of whether the new nodes are Windows or BSD.

    Perhaps they could have made a better choice of OS, for *name your favorite reason here*. But hey, it's Microsoft, and they're in love with thier own stuff! Aren't we all? :)

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