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Netcraft Says IIS Gaining on Apache 666

benjymouse quotes this month's netcraft survey "In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position."
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Netcraft Says IIS Gaining on Apache

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  • by dsginter ( 104154 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:20AM (#20129657)
    Is this the possible result of Microsoft converting Godaddy's parked domains [microsoft.com] to Windows servers?
    • by the_mighty_$ ( 726261 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:35AM (#20129825)

      I don't think parked domains are considered "active servers." The Netcraft stats show that IIS is gaining ground against Apache even faster among active servers than nonactive servers (see this graph [netcraft.com]). Godaddy switching to IIS would not explain that.

      Or am I misunderstanding what "active servers" are?

    • by OriginalArlen ( 726444 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:45AM (#20129955)
      Not likely - if you look at the Netcraft charts, you can see the decline's been steady and consistent for several months (6-9-12 or so IIRC. No, I haven't read the article yet because I was only looking at the Netcraft survey & getting depressed a couple of months back, and I know that I'll be mightily cheered up by the comments in a few hours' time -- the lame humour, I-for-one, accusations of M$-funded FUD, assertions that it's because Windows shops are all full of fules and madmen... and so on. That really gives me hope that Free software will triumph in the end.

    • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Monday August 06, 2007 @12:01PM (#20130957)
      LA LA LA LA LA I AM NOT LISTENING.

      Wake up people! IIS Lately is just as secure as Apache, Development with .NET is easier and faster then PHP is for a lot of jobs. Installations doesn't require modifying text files.... Sure apache has its plusses and many of them are substantial. But this Excuses and ignoring the facts will only lead to your own disaster. Much like how mainframes died (or at least greatly diminished) over a decade ago. Sure Mainframes are faster and better then PC components but that is not what the people want. Open Source and Apache is doing the same thing, it is putting in stuff that they think they want not the bulk of their users. People want a GUI configuration tool, People want it to be defaultly built in with a full featured server side language. People don't want to compile their installation with a bunch of of cryptic commands for features they do or do not know what it does. People want GUI Application Development software so what they program will go onto the server. Apache and the OSS Community is doing a poor job in offering such services to the people. So in the spirit of freedom that the OSS Community as given them they feel free to use IIS because it gives them what they need. Most people do not have the time or the will to program these changes, most people only like Open Source Applications because it is free IIS comes already with Windows Server so it is fee enough for them. Don't be stupid and make excuses while more and more market-share slips away go an actively improve your product to help keep the market share you have and perhaps influence others to go back to IIS.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        Installations doesn't require modifying text files....

        Ok, you're not the first to write that, but I've got to reply to someone, so it's you.

        Show me a shop that goes with IIS because of this and I'll show you a shop with crappy IT managers.

        If you are an IT manager worth his payment, you realize that if your admins can't handle a machine on the machine level, then the first time something breaks in a way the GUI doesn't provide a flashy wizard for you will be calling in consultants that take ten times as much per hour as your in-house staff does. If you think o

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jez9999 ( 618189 )
        Wake up people! IIS Lately is just as secure as Apache, Development with .NET is easier and faster then PHP...

        I've got a question for you, and everyone, really.

        Do you want operating systems and development software to be forever dominated by a single corporation that charges you what they want for each, even if their stuff is a bit better? I mean, fundamentally, that's what pisses me off. Are we really going to still have a vast number of electronic devices running, and having stuff developed for, Microso
  • Is there any compelling reason _not_ to use apache?! o.O
    • Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thatskinnyguy ( 1129515 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:26AM (#20129705)
      People (I.T. guys included) will almost always go with what they are comfortable with. IIS is very easy to configure and you could have a Windows Server up and running in no time. With Apache, it's not so simple. Modifying text files gives the admins great control over nearly everything; but it's not so simple. And some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS.

      I personally use Apache on my servers. But I could also take my good old time configuring them because I'm not planning on making any money from them.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )

        Modifying text files gives the admins great control over nearly everything; but it's not so simple.
        You can say that again. The pseudo-XML in httpd.conf makes me long for something nice and simple like sendmail.mc...
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Pig Hogger ( 10379 )

          The pseudo-XML in httpd.conf makes me long for something nice and simple like sendmail.mc...
          Wimp. Real sysadmins work with sendmail.cf.
        • Re:What?! (Score:4, Funny)

          by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @12:47PM (#20131423) Homepage

          You can say that again. The pseudo-XML in httpd.conf makes me long for something nice and simple like sendmail.mc...


          Be careful of using technology-related sarcasm on slashdot. Somebody's going to read that, mod it as 'Insightful', and mean it.
      • Re:What?! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:53AM (#20130033)

        some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS.


        A "n00b admin" isn't going to be able to master anything in a weekend. They might figure out how to set something up & get it working but mastery is a long ways off.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Tom ( 822 )

          A "n00b admin" isn't going to be able to master anything in a weekend. They might figure out how to set something up & get it working but mastery is a long ways off.

          Which sums up the whole windos universe problem very nicely.

          Yes, I know current versions of IIS don't even compare to, say IIS 4. I also know that Active Directory and all the other nice features enable you to set up a really great corporate network with some tough security.

          Problem is: 99% of the windos admins and/or MCSE people don't know shit. There are exceptions. I've met some. They are a minority. Most corporate networks are run by what in other industries would equate to apprentices.

          Yes, there are kn

      • Webmin is easy enough to use.

        Some Linux distros come with tools to make setting up Apache easy as well. I just set up a test LAMP stack on my Mandriva desktop and it was very simple, apart form one well known and documented problem (you need to install MySQL before mod_php). All point and click, of course.

        Ubuntu can install a LAMP stack for you when you install the OS. I do not find configuration of Apache on Ubuntu so easy though.
      • Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:46AM (#20130771)
        I kinda must agree there. I've always been an Apache guy. We use it on lots and lots of servers here, and it's never been that bad to setup. Recently though, we bought an app whose web component is ASP.NET based and needs to run on IIS. While it hasn't gotten me to switch off of Apache on my other boxes, I must say that the configuration utilities and flexibility (not degree but ease with which you can exercise it) was certainly a welcome thing. While I'm sure that Apache can probably do more when fine tuned, if IIS can do 80% of what Apache does with 20% of the effort, it's gonna win some converts.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by baggins2001 ( 697667 )
        Some nOOb could think they have mastered IIS in a weekend. Because they could get a web site up and running. That's really part of the problem. People setting up Web Servers not knowing what they are doing.
        It's akin to people thinking they are CEO material, just because they can make a power point presentation.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by moosesocks ( 264553 )

        People (I.T. guys included) will almost always go with what they are comfortable with. IIS is very easy to configure and you could have a Windows Server up and running in no time. With Apache, it's not so simple. Modifying text files gives the admins great control over nearly everything; but it's not so simple. And some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS.

        Really?

        sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server
        sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

        This gi

    • At least in higher education, you sometimes find yourself having to run 3rd-party software that requires IIS. In a nutshell we do all our in-house development on pure LAMP, but departments tend to buy commercial software that won't run on LAMP at all. This same software tends to own/modify/taint the IIS machines so they become single-purposed windows servers. Hopefully Vmware ESX is gonna tame that beast sooner or later for us.


      Michael

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by plague3106 ( 71849 )
      IIS comes with Windows servers and has an easy configuration GUI?
      • Easy? (Score:3, Insightful)

        ...and has an easy configuration GUI

        Based on my experience with MS products, GUIs make really shitty configuration interfaces. You have to click all over the place to set things up, and there is no way to look at very many of the options at a time when they are spread across multiple tabs. Fine when you are following a "run sheet", but a total nightmare when you are trying to troubleshoot something.

        Have you ever actually used the IIS or Exchange (or even Outlook) configuration GUI? <shudder>

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by realmolo ( 574068 )
      There is, in fact, a reason not to use Apache.

      The configuration/managment tools suck. In fact, they're mostly non-existent. To get the most out of Apache, you are going to be editing configuration files by hand.

      Now, don't get me wrong, Apache is great, and dealing with the configuration issues is not THAT difficult, and the benefits are worth the effort. But MAN. IIS is *so* much easier to deal with when it comes to 99% of the configuration duties that you need to do on a web server. The defaults are sane,
      • Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by walt-sjc ( 145127 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:48AM (#20129987)
        Having used both extensively over the past 10 years, IMHO 90% of the config tasks are easier with IIS for a non-expert, but
        5% are MUCH harder, and the remaining 5% you just can't do at all. Period. It's that 5% that makes IIS a non-option for me personally. For some of the sites we host, either server would work fine, but in those cases, there is no reason to pay a license fee for IIS.

        One of the other benefits of having worked with both apache and IIS is that that 90% of what is normally easier in IIS really isn't if you develop internal tools to do that work for apache. In fact, a single web page with just a few fields on it runs a script that sets up DNS, apache, firewall, database, chroot jail, and optionally even an entire virtual machine, fully configured and running.

        It's just "by default" those scripts are not included with Apache like they are with IIS.

        Also, once you learn the Apache syntax and understand how things work, it turns out that using an editor isn't any harder than the IIS GUI. In fact, it's usually MUCH easier/faster for anything repetitive.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Tom ( 822 )
        Yes and no.

        I've successfully fixed and restarted a broken Apache configuration on a Palm III going online via mobile phone and IR link (I was on the train, no other option for at least half an hour).

        Try that with IIS. And no, that wasn't a minor thing, the company was losing an estimated 500 for every minute the server was down.

        There are many good reasons why plain-text configuration files are still a good idea in 2007. One of them is that if you want a flashy GUI go and write one. You can. It's an open, we
    • Re:What?! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:42AM (#20129907) Homepage
      Is there any compelling reason _not_ to use apache?! o.O

      If you are using Visual Studio dotNet as your development environment you are not going to find Apache works too well.

      The netcraft survey is bunk because it measures a quantity that has always been irrelevant. In the past the market share of Apache was artificially inflated because most parked domains would sit on Apache boxes. Now Microsoft has identified that as an issue they are starting to get the advantage.

      The quantity of interest is not who supplies the Web server but what the development platform is. As a practical matter any code of interest can run on ISS but rather less can run on Apache and less again on LAMP.

      And there is no guarantee that the code engine will be visible in any case. You could easily have an IIS back end written in dotNET being served up through a squid front end.

      And the rate of use says nothing as to whether the software is any damn good. There are still plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL coders even though the languages are abysmal.

      • Re:What?! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:27AM (#20130479)
        "There are still plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL coders even though the languages are abysmal."

        That's a pretty ignorant statement. I know very little about COBOL, but Fortran is a very useful language. It is extremely well suited to numerical and scientific computation. That's a small market, to be sure, but an important one. There's a reason why the most recent standard came out in 2003 and another is in the works (tentively Fortran 2008). There's a reason why Intel sells high performance compilers for two languages: C/C++ and Fortran, which they actively update.

        There is no such thing as a "best" programming language. They are tools and you should use the right tool for the job. You can accomplish a given job with essentially any tool (by necessity, any Turing complete language can do anything any other can, including implement the other language) but that doesn't mean they are all created equal. Just because you don't like Fortran doesn't mean it doesn't have uses.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by aldousd666 ( 640240 )
      At present .NET seems to be gaining ground as a platform. I know that apache supports some version of it, but if companies are looking to take advantage of all of the benefits of .net and the new WCF (like IIS hosted WCF services, which are as easy to set up as a config file,) then they probably go with something they can phone up support and get covered on. Also, with using Microsoft for .net there is no waiting for the Mono to get feature X covered. I think between ASP.NET ajax, and .NET 3.0, a lot of f
    • Re:What?! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BasharTeg ( 71923 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:07AM (#20130217) Homepage
      Have you ever used .NET? That's why.

      Since we've converted our systems and middleware development to C# .NET, all of our developers have become much much more effective. The defect rates of our new C# code compared to our old C++ code are microscopic. We've converted our Apache based SOAP server to ASP.NET's XML WebServices and found that the development is faster, the code is cleaner, and again the defect rate is down. Our web development is currently in PHP, but we've found that if our web developers write C# / ASP.NET, our systems developers can help out with quality control, supplying code samples and advice, and even directly coding for the web. We're in the process of planning the ASP.NET version of our web applications.

      The simple fact is, whether you like Microsoft or not, .NET is a great platform for the rapid development of low defect applications. If you don't develop on Windows, give Mono a shot. I consider their successful efforts to be amazing.

      For our purposes, the fact that we use .NET and we want to stay on the .NET train (advancements in IIS7 are going to be very useful to us) using IIS6 as our webserver is a no-brainer.

      Apache certainly works, but the question for us is, why use Apache? What is so compelling about Apache that would make us want to give up IIS6? We've used Apache for years and continue to do so to this day, but it isn't doing anything special for us except hosting PHP scripts (the performance of which, even with an accelerator, could be better).
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by the_womble ( 580291 )

        The defect rates of our new C# code compared to our old C++ code are microscopic.

        Well, that is a surprise! Why not drop the apples to oranges comparison and compare c# to Java?
  • Sooo.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by yoprst ( 944706 )
    Netcraft confirms it?
  • by JeremyGNJ ( 1102465 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:26AM (#20129703)
    The person above asked if there's any compelling reason not to use apache.

    I think the question to ask is if there's any compelling reason not to use IIS. I'm sure people will spew "because it's Microsoft and you dont want your website hacked", but that's not what I'm talking about. IIS has had some problems in the past, but these days it's pretty good.

    The question is when an organization already has an investment in Windows, and local domains, management tools etc....is there any reason not to use IIS? Does apache provide anything above and beyond what IIS provides when it comes to general website hosting?
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mwilliamson ( 672411 )
      Running PHP/MySQL/PERL/PostgreSQL on windows is a pain in the butt. There is no automatic update mechanism like you get with almost any linux distribution, integration is poor, and support is almost entirely for running PHP/MySQL/PERL/PostgreSQL is for Linux.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Fallingcow ( 213461 )
        Add Ruby on Rails, Python, and Tomcat to that list.

        The biggest reason to use Apache over IIS is that Apache runs best on *nix systems... and so does most of the rest of the best web-oriented server and dev software.

        Plus, there are so many great command-line tools (or GUI tools that have a command line mode with a simple switch) which can be (carefully) integrated into web apps that simply aren't available (or don't work as well) on Windows, and open up all kinds of interesting possibilities. Windows doesn'
    • by shinma ( 106792 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:31AM (#20129785) Homepage
      There is no integrated mod_rewrite solution on IIS.

      That's enough of a dealbreaker for me.
      • by cerberusss ( 660701 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:07AM (#20130225) Journal

        There is no integrated mod_rewrite solution on IIS.
        On the one hand, mod_rewrite has made many of my customers happy. On the other hand, mod_rewrite has caused my hair to fall out, has costed two keyboards (flung to the wall), and countless spills of good coffee.

        In short, I've come to regard it as the primary sign of the coming of the antichrist.
      • by Bellum Aeternus ( 891584 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @01:55PM (#20132171)
        You can do the same type of thing mid-request stream with .Net and there are a number of ISAPI filters that do similar things (ISAPI_REWRITE comes to mind) if you don't want to use .Net. Finally, it's easy enough to code your own ISAPI filter to do the job just fine. In fact, if you're not a half bad coder you can develop something lighter than mod_rewrite because it does just what you need and no more.

        Lastly, what I find almost funny is that most LAMP devs assume because a site is hosted on IIS that MSSQL is the backend. I've worked on a lot of IIS/.Net sites and about half are MSSQL and other half are MySQL. Each has its advantages and a smart development house will decide based on what it needs its RDBMS to do - not based on some software ethics.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      1. You don't have to run Windows. You may pick and choose from a number of different OSs including Windows.
      2. Lower cost. You may choose the lowest cost platform for deployment. If for you that is Windows you can use Windows.
      3. Better security options. You may run Apache on secure Linux which does have a higher government security rating then is available for Windows. Or you could run on OpenBSD which does have a very good security history.
      4. No vendor lock in. IIS is single source as is the OS it runs on.
  • As long as the site is designed to support open standards and work cross browser, does it really matter what is running on the server side?

    My take is that this is just more indication that MS's FUD campaign about patents is working.

    That said, I have about a hundred servers, most running Linux, supporting a large complex web site. I see no reason to change to a MS based site, and due to the technology used, it would take a MASSIVE effort to port anyway.
  • Namely a little bit of boredom in the web world plus the difficulty of trying to find new and interesting sites now that folks have figured out how to manipulate Google rankings.

    Plus the fact that you can now run many more LAMP web sites per server than was previously possible. I mean, figure it out -- how many virtual sites can a person run on a modern fully configured Apache server than they could in say, 1999 before the dot com bubble burst. CPUs cores are something like 4-5x more powerful if not more, hard disk arrays bigger and faster, and the configuration setups probably ten times better. So it takes less Apache servers to run more sites, yes?
  • Uptime (Score:5, Informative)

    by ciryon ( 218518 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:40AM (#20129891) Journal
    Apache has a vast majority of sites with longest uptime [netcraft.com].
  • by ThinkFr33ly ( 902481 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:40AM (#20129893)
    IIS already has a pretty dramatic marketshare lead [port80software.com] when it comes to the Fortune 1000.
    • by SerpentMage ( 13390 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:50AM (#20130009)
      Not surprising because we are moving away from "hobbies" to "packages."

      By hobbies I mean how many new dot coms are being created? How many people are creating new and nifty content? Some sure, but the vast majority of folks are companies that see the web as a necessity and not a money maker.

      The innovative companies need flexibility, power and tunability, which is given by Apache, and the LAMP stack. The corporations that see the web as a necessity just want to put information onto the Internet. They don't care about "social networks." They just care that their catalog can be viewed. And that is the domain of Microsoft, not Apache.

      I personally see these statistics as a maturation of the web, not that Apache is loosing market share.
  • The ASP Effect? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by INeededALogin ( 771371 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:54AM (#20130037) Journal
    In the last 5 years... I went to 2 Universities. One of them was a crappy, private University whose entire program focused on Microsoft. It was one of those afterwork, pay us a lot of money for a degree thing. I left that place and went to a State University(soon to be the largest in the state). I was shocked to find out from the CS majors that they had a large Microsoft Curriculum as well. Apparently, Microsoft gives a lot of money to the Universities to ensure that they are a central part the curriculum. Since a lot of students are learning about ASP, Visual Basic and .NET... is it any surprise that these same students are going into the workplace and using these tools instead of a perl, php, ruby, python inside of Apache.
    • Re:The ASP Effect? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Puls4r ( 724907 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:19AM (#20130379)
      I'm surprised you aren't modded higher, frankly. This is the primary reasons open source isn't doing well. People stay with what they are comfortable with. MS Office in high school => MS office in college => MS office in the workplace. Windows in high school => Windows in college => Windows in the workplace. Geeks are constantly in denial about these things because they are always working to make things better, faster, and more efficient. But "People", generally speaking, go with what's comfortable, easy, and common. Drop down menus, radio boxes, etc are "common". Command line? Editting Text files? Apache better get out of the whole in a hurry. The server market is no longer a market where you can afford to be different. It's a commodity market, they are a dime a dozen, and if I can click a radio box as opposed to editing a text file - guess which I'm going to do?
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gunnk ( 463227 )
        Good grief! That radio button is the PROBLEM not the SOLUTION. I *hate* dealing with IIS and 2003 because of the GUI. No, I don't mind being able to click buttons and boxes -- much easier -- but trying to look at your configuration when a problem arises means going through all those zillion menus, boxes and buttons looking for the one that was clicked by mistake. I'd much rather just read a text config file. MUCH quicker.
  • by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:03AM (#20130159) Homepage Journal
    Does it matter anymore? The point was made years ago. Apache's triumph on the web was touted during a time when we were trying to make a point that open source software was legitimate for large scale use in the real world. Everyone knows that now. In fact, open source has conclusively, and probably forever, denied Microsoft a monopoly in the server market. If they are making gains now (and yes, their biggest gains are most certainly in parking sites, to whom they probably pay megabucks for no other purpose than to skew the Netcraft survey) it isn't really relevant.
  • Lower Quality Admins (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pembo13 ( 770295 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:08AM (#20130231) Homepage
    I think the main reason for this is that the quality of admins is dropping. I say this not because they are using a Microsoft product, but because more and more my interactions with supposed sysadmins are quite depressing.
  • by Toreo asesino ( 951231 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:44AM (#20130741) Journal
    I personally think IIS is a superior webserver to Apache. I speak as someone who's had to administer both systems, and like anything each has thier own quirks + benefits etc, but crucially...

    Apache is not as modular as IIS (v7 that is). IIS7 you can literally strip it so bare, all it can do is send empty HTTP 200 responses - an absolute shell of a webserver. Not even file html/file-system support. Want disk-access? Turn on disk-access module. Want asp.net? Turn on the asp.net module. Absolutely everything (and really, everything) is a module that can be ripped out.

    IIS6+ deals with HTTP requests at a kernel level. That is core functionality such as responses, caching, etc are all dealt with at ring0. Performance is unbeatable.

    Oh and security? IIS6 has never been rooted, ever. Add-ons have been (asp.net for instance), but IIS6 has never been.

    Oh, and it's locked down by default. And easy to administer.

    In my opinion Linux is probably the better OS to host a webserver on, but IIS does spank Apache all over I'm afraid - mainly for the stated reasons above.
    • by Tom ( 822 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @02:18PM (#20132417) Homepage Journal

      IIS6+ deals with HTTP requests at a kernel level. That is core functionality such as responses, caching, etc are all dealt with at ring0. Performance is unbeatable.
      The biggest plus and biggest liability of the windos system. Running crucial non-kernel functionality at ring 0. Yes, it gives you performance. Early windos versions would've been unusable without trickery like that. At the same time, it's a security, reliability and debugging nightmare. It also makes it necessary to essentially re-write windos every few years, because you can't incrementally update all this low-level shit - it's too much to do it all at once, and it'll break in fascinating ways if you don't.

      MS is - and always has been - an engineering shop. They never invented anything, and they don't do good design, either. What they're good at is the same thing the chinese are good at: Copy stuff from elsewhere and manufacture more of it cheaper. They're also really good at marketing.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        Again, that's not really the case. If you look at what is dealt with in kernel mode, it's extremely low-level. Anything more complex than handling & queuing HTTP requests or returning cache is handed off to isolated user-mode processes.

        Have a look - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windo wsserver2003/technologies/webapp/iis/iis6perf.mspx [microsoft.com]

        Thus, even basic file-handling is done by an isolated process running at the lowest level of security by default (Network Service in Win2k3).
        • by Tom ( 822 )
          I know the basic idea. It's not exactly an innovation. Heck, you had khttpd in Linux how many years ago?

          Very useful if you really need to serve stuff out at speeds no network cards on the market can handle.

          It still means every bug in it is a kernel-level bug.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by QuoteMstr ( 55051 )
      Performance isn't really a problem when using Apache.

      Okay, when you serve a request, you're either running a program (in some way) to generate the content, or you're serving something already on disk, using the webserver itself.

      In the first case, dynamic content, the specifics of the server are going to be lost in the noise. We benchmarked my company's webserver overhead at 3ms on a 100ms request, and that's pretty typical of web applications. Getting that down to 2ms is not going to increase overall perfor
  • Apache on Windows (Score:3, Interesting)

    by athloi ( 1075845 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:47AM (#20130779) Homepage Journal
    Apache on windows is not a difficult install. I've done it many times, for multi-homed domains, and it works quite well.

    People install IIS so they can use Microsoft's varied and highly efficient enterprise application development tools. The tools are superior for business needs, and so with them come the operating system and web server.

    I continue to prefer Apache on FreeBSD (not Linux) as my primary platform if I want stuff to work right from the beginning, but on Windows 2003 or greater or Linux from the same vintage, practical performance (real-world factors that users and business cohorts will notice) is very, very close.

    The operating system has grown up and so has the web server. The vast gulfs in performance are no longer so vast. I'm not sure how I feel about this either. Part of me will forever be nostalgic for the computer gang warfare days of the 1980s, when Apple II users snubbed PC owners, Commodore 64/128 users were lawbreaking maniacs, the weird kids used Ataris to make techno and the Amiga people were as annoying as the Macintosh people are today.

    Interestingly, from the days of the 286 onward, finding home UNIXen was not as difficult as one might think. First AT&T, then Minix, then a number of ports of Berkeley and AT&T UNIXes came down the path. True, it required top-notch hardware, but that was an artifact of the time when most machines were 1-8 MHz boxes.

    Ah, nostalgia!
  • by AaronLawrence ( 600990 ) * on Monday August 06, 2007 @11:57AM (#20130905)
    MS is good at this game of incrementally taking market share away from competitors. They have been doing it for years. They will match features, add luxuries, push it hard to business types, give it away, offer automated conversion ... whatever they think it takes.

    Nobody thought Office could replace WordStar, but MS beavered away at it, adding new features people liked and matching existing features, and now it's a distant memory. Same for Excel. The first versions of windows were jokes, but MS kept working on them and took the desktop over. Nobody used Windows as a server at first, but MS built NT and improved it and now they run the majority of small businesses and many larger ones. They had nothing in the database server market, but they bought SQL Server from Sybase and beavered away at it, and now they run a decent percentage of websites and many businesses. They were late to "the internet" but turned things round, built a browser that was the best for a while (IE5), and a web server that is now a serious contender.

    Meanwhile Linux gains at the expense of Unix, and Linux geeks sit complacently back thinking they cannot be assailed. In reality the same forces that MS brough to bear on the desktop apply here: ignorance of alternatives, familiarity, PHBs, marketing, training, and, for the most part, the ability to do a decent job. Add to that the ability to easily integrate existing desktop/small business stuff, like connecting to COM objects, SQL server, .NET, Office, etc, all the stuff that millions of developers are already familiar with.

    It makes me nervous to think that Microsoft could take the server off Unix/Linux as well. I don't think it's as far off as some might think. They are learning from Linux/Unix, in that their newer stuff is taking things like "xcopy deployment" and XML for ocnfig quite seriously.
  • by xeno ( 2667 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @12:04PM (#20130983)
    Even accounting for the GoDaddy domain-parking nonsense, there's not much to these numbers. An IIS server is not equal to an Apache server in any way, shape or form. It would be like saying there are more IIS bicycles on the road than Apache locomotives, so therefore IIS is more important to the transport of people or goods. It's demonstrably bunk. While quantitative evidence is out there regarding applications and numbers of users per server, I think the following anecdotal bit sums it up nicely.

    In a very large quasi-governmental organization, we have a major application that runs on a handful of Oracle systems and serves double-digit thousands of people with acceptable performance over the last half dozen years. There is an ill-thought-out project underway (a year into development) to replace this with a steaming pile of .NET. And it's a BIG pile.

    How big? Follow me on this one: First they modeled the .NET application on the old client-server app, but the network chatter was 20x the capacity of the network because the MS-trained app architects could not wrap their heads around the idea of a constrained WAN. What used to be a small record lookup and update of about 300k over the wire turned into more than 6MB of inter-domain line noise.

    Then they decided that WAN applications must mean that we wanted a web application (how silly of us), and they re-wrote it as a web app. Not understanding that a significant amount of those users are off-line and synchronize only once a day, the connection/session limits were quickly saturated even before many users complained that they simply could not connect.

    The third solution proposed by Microsoft consultants and one of the largest Indian development houses? Install IIS on every remote user's laptop, and have SQL Server synchronize in the background so that the newly web-ified application can operate offline. Let me clarify that: For these thousands of remote roaming workers in the field, many with a public IP, there is one copy if IIS PER USER for a major MS application. And while every time this comes up the Indian developers mutter under their breath things so foul I didn't think you could say them in Hindi, the MS-employed wonks ...BLINK... BLINK... don't seem to recognize there's even an issue.

    So the discrepancy is not that IIS is "gaining" on Apache, but that IIS is being dumped out in the street in every cereal box and bubblegum wrapper as part of the .NET mess for purposes it's clearly incapable of serving and that even Apache would be no good for . Just my subjective opinion, but I don't think anyone would ever do this with Apache. The result is that a single project -- an abject failure of a bad design from every meaningful metric, and the willful ignorance of user requirements in favor of vendor fantasies -- shows up on a webserver market share survey as a several-thousand-instance win for MS. By all indication from MS consultants, this is not a unique event.

    In the immortal words of Stan Lee: 'Nuff said.

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday August 06, 2007 @12:17PM (#20131127)
    Apache is neat. Very neat.
    PHP is neat. Very neat.
    Compared to any other SSI solution that is.

    ...etc. ...

    There is but one problem. The world and especially the web and it's technologies is moving along at a breathtaking pace. Apache is neat, but it's style of configuration is nearly 10 years old from back when XML was considered the hottest thing since sliced bread.
    Why isn't there a zero-fuss web interface backend built into Apache that enables me to configure anything I want with 3 clicks of a mouse (with a backend deactivation option of course). Why isn't there a version of PHP with a MySQL driven persistance layer and SQL-free serialisation built right into it?
    How come a little bit of marketing, screencasts and a website which, for once, doesn't look like shit, and suddenly people think Rails is the holy grail of webdeving? Rails and the hip project hype they kicked off is a very good thing, but it shouldn't stop just there.

    Don't get me wrong. I'm convinced that Microsoft, in terms of available software technology, is an incarnation of evil and should be avoided at all costs unless there is a solid reason not to. 'Client wants Exchange' could be one. But we have to be realistic about this. It takes only a handfull of people at MS with 2 or more braincells, freshly assigned decision power and half a billion out of Microsofts piggybank to build an entire webstack that blows any OSS solution (Zope, Rails, Django and whatnot included) out of the water and into next wednesday, technology wise. Even the most advanced OSS webstack today has superfluos installation fuss one has to go through that should disapear ASAP. There is a lure of a truely zero-fuss .Net. Look at the countless Linux people flocking to Mac OS X to see what I mean.

    IIS, .Net and whatever from MS not sucking to much is a reaction to the pressure the feel from OSS. They may be reacting to this, thus the rise in IIS hits.

    Then again, MS bought Godaddy just to raise their level of IIS installs by a few percent, and LAMP machines are extremely Multi-Domain friendly. This Necraft study might just be reflecting this. And I have no doubt that should Apache drop to a real 30%, they'd get their shit together and start building a full integrated OSS webstack that picks up where Zope ends. And not only halfway there. I hope so anyway.

    My 2 Eurocents.
  • by mpapet ( 761907 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @12:26PM (#20131213) Homepage
    I don't know jack about the methodology Netcraft uses nor do they make it clear. The "top developers" attributes Google as the big winner, but there's no documentation on those stats either.

    This page is pretty strange. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/requested.html [netcraft.com] The site blink.nu is a microsoft press release machine of some kind and has ~1.6 times the number of queries of the next nearest site. Odd to say the least.

    Conjecture aside, what's happening is all kinds of GPL(ish) projects are growing and the stats are being positioned as a loss for Apache. This is very similar to how NPD intellect royally screws Apple in favor of Microsoft by aggregating all PC's with Microsoft's OS against Apple. Disaggregate the numbers by vendor and you find Apple does extremely well in consumer segments.
  • by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @12:42PM (#20131383) Homepage
    As I have been following spam trends, I have noticed increasingly that a lot of spam is originating from compromised boxes within the US at hosting facilities. Some of these compromised boxes are LAMP boxes, but the majority of them are Windows boxes I have been finding. (sources from outside the US are somewhat irrelevant to me since I set up spamassassin rules that ranks spam from outside the US well above the minimum score... the vast majority of actual spam is coming from connections outside of the US even if the originators are still from the U.S.)

    So as we see this increase in Windows servers on the net, I fear we'll see an increase in incidents of machines compromised for bot membership and on and on.

    I'm *NOT* saying that Linux is more secure in this regard. As mentioned above, some compromised boxes are, in fact, LAMP boxes. I'm saying that Windows boxes are an easier target and are targeted more often and compromised successfully quite often with automated measures since they are all typically configured the same ways with the same directory structures, software patches and updates etc. (With the variety of Linux distros out there, there is far less incident of homogeny in system configuration which at the very least slows down automated procedures for compromises and take-overs.)

    In any case, I think there's a distinction to be noted in that more frequently targeted doesn't mean less secure. (I hope G.W.Bush isn't reading this...) But given that Linux and Windows security is equal (indulge me), what does it mean when Windows is targeted more often?
  • Help me! Seriously, I need a new technology.

    I like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) as much as the next want-to-be web developer out there.

    Started with FAMP (FreeBSD), to LAMP, to LAPP (PostgreSQL)...

    But now I'm ridiculously on LLPR! (Linux, Lighttpd, PostgreSQL, Ruby)

    Can someone please develop something with a vowel?!?

  • by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @04:46PM (#20134339) Homepage

    I've never had any trouble configuring Apache. But then, I'm a geek. The problem isn't so much that Apache or PHP is losing out to IIS or .NET ... the problem (as we see it) is that geeks are losing out to suits.

Where there's a will, there's a relative.

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