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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Defending MS Operating Systems?
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Scoble defends XP as a stable OS. He's got a point- XP is far better in this regard than any of the previous OS efforts from MS - my machine crashes rarely. On the other hand, it does rot. What do I mean by that? Well, two things - first, the longer I run XP without a reboot, the slower and more "funky" it gets. By "funky", I mean weird things start to happen - some app windows periodically decide that they are "always on top" - even though they were never set that way. Startup time for applications gets slower in general. A reboot usually fixes those problems (at least for awhile). There's another sort of slowdown as well - over time, the OS just runs slower, period. XP is not as snappy for me now as it was a few months ago, and I haven't been installing much new software. I have no idea why this happens, but I figure I'll likely have to do a clean re-install relatively soon. At that point, I'll be really unhappy over the whole installation registration thing, since I have no idea where I put that information. Then there's the periodic need to reboot for no good reason - after some update from MS or Norton, typically. Contrast that with my Linux box, running a relatively old (RedHat 7) rev of Linux. It's been up for 266 days now (the last downtime was a power outage that outlasted my battery backup). Is it slower? No. Is X11 getting "funky"? No. I have apps that have been running for months on that box. The production server in Cincinnati (running a more recent rev of Linux) has been up for 205 days. It shouldn't be down for power reasons anymore either; there's a solid generator backing up Cincom servers now.
Here's my bottom line, having run both XP and Linux for quite awhile now - if you run production servers (I don't mean clients!) on Windows, you are just nuts. Linux is easier to patch without downtime, and doesn't need to be rebooted every few weeks "just because". Apache is a whole lot more stable than IIS, and seems to be have far fewer nasty security issues associated with it. The VW app server I use for the various services on this box runs quite nicely with either Apache or IIS - the server over on the main site used to integrate with IIS, for instance. It was much harder to deal with. When a Windows server can be remotely administered via ssh and command line tools, maybe I'll have some motivation to consider it for production systems - until then, it's just not worth the trouble.
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