Linux vs Windows
From time to time since my relevance with computer knowledge; I been asked a question that Why is Linux preferred over Windows when it comes to main stream network management? I always used to give them crap that Windows GUI is so graphic intensive or Linux had this endless server management capabilities and so on. These points might hold somewhat little significance with the facts but still a scientific proof was needed; even to satisfy my own self inside.
Until a few days ago while carrying on the work on my dissertation (Mapping of User Quality-of-Experience to Application Perceived Performance for Web Applications). It involved capturing of network traces. In order for our time stamps to be very highly accurate; Our professor implemented that we should use the NTP (Network Time Protocol) in order to synchronize all the clocks of machines involved in our experiment. Hence the computers were synchronized to the pool servers available on the NTP.ORG.
At this point it would be useful to inform you that it was a client server setup; our servers were running Linux OS and Windows XP was running on the client. Now that we had synchronized all the clock on the computers with the help of NTP. To get the scientific proof; we compared how much synchronized the clocks were. Again the genius our professor is; he had this tool designed in Perl for comparison of the system clock to see how much they were synchronized with respect to the reference server (i.e. the NTP pool servers).
I would share some statistical results taken form that tool. In the following graph the comparison between the different computers are shown.
Blue and red lines represent a Linux system while the Green represents a Windows XP system. As visible the greenery is all over the place. This graph basically shows how they systems are synchronized with respect to the reference server. On the Y-Axis the deviation between the computers is given in seconds. While on X-Axis time probes are illustrated. Evidently from the graphs the Linux Systems are the most synchronized ones deviating less than a couple of milliseconds from the reference server. While there is a very strange behavior shown by the windows system.
At this point I remembered a news article that appeared online which reported “London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform” (Available Online: http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform ).
Now next time when some one asks me why is Linux preferred over windows in main stream server management; at least I would not give them any crap :D
