Very interesting . . .

[Bruce Smith <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A friend of mine found this on the net and forwarded it to me.
I found it to be very interesting reading.

I wonder how Linux would fit into this?
I bet it'd be much closer to FreeBSE than NT!!!   (Duh! :)

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
--------------------------------------------

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Buy a PC and install Microsoft software on it.  For a large server, you'll 
need Windows NT, and the software license will cost about as much as the 
server.  Microsoft has a solutions and best practices Web page that states 
that you can expect to move about 6 gigabytes (GB) a day from three Compaq 
ProLiant 5000s or 5500s with four Pentium Pro processors and 512 megabytes 
of memory each.  In order to maintain availability, Microsoft recommends 
that you install multiple systems with failover. 

Buy a PC and install FreeBSD on it.  The hardware would appear to cost the 
same, but you don't pay anything for the software.  In fact, as the hardware 
configuration for wcarchive.cdrom.com shows, this is misleading.  wcarchive 
is only a single system with a single CPU, also a Pentium Pro.  In contrast 
to Microsoft's 6 GB of downloads per day, however, it routinely transfers 
more than 700 GB of data a day for to up to 3,600 concurrent users.  This is 
over 100 times the performance of three larger Windows NT machines combined. 
On December 2, 1998, wcarchive transferred 820,097,694,368 bytes of data, 
making it the busiest FTP server in the world.