Guest post by Royal Pingdom blog has posted with a comparison of home page load times and uptimes and concludes that various Linux distributions and Apple, both beat Microsoft’s record.
- 13/16 Linux distributions (and Apple) had less downtime than Microsoft’s homepage.
- 5/16 Linux distributions had less downtime than Apple’s homepage.
- Four homepages had NO downtime: Red Hat, Mepis, Knoppix and Fedora.
- Five homepages had more than an hour of downtime: Gentoo, Mandriva, Mint, Arch and Microsoft.
This might be interesting if data was taken for 6 months or better yet a year. As a Arch user, I’m sure they would fare much better with longer term data.
and how many of those have 3 properties on the alexa top 20? you compare microsoft.com to yahoo or google, not arch. It’s not hard to maintain uptime when you only have a few thousand visits a month.
On the other hand, it’s not hard to maintain uptime when you have microsoft’s resources to pour into failover and redundant systems.
Either way, the pingdom statistics are pretty meaningless. All it really tells us is that all of these sites (except Arch) are stable enough for visitors to not notice any downtime and that’s what really matters. As for Arch, they could have switched providers or servers or whatever in this (too short) time frame and the result is probably not representative for the long-term availability.
While funny, it is meaningless.
…but total bogus 😉
If those linux distro sites encounter so much traffic as microsoft.com has every second, they will die in convultions. By the way, microsoft.com is a very large and sophisticated system, involving a lot of Windows and UNIX servers, with load balancing and caching from third party. Actually end user does not touch microsoft’s hardware at all (:
Yes but most Linux distro websites and Apple’s are significantly small compare to the scale of Microsoft’s website.
I can remember the Fedora site being hacked… I wouldn’t consider that uptime, since the site wasn’t really useful at that time.
What about RHN, it is under heavy use and traffic, I don’t know where you get a few thousand people going to redhat.com they get a lot of traffic.
Plus, RHN is a entire model based off configuration, downloads, uploads, managing MS does not even come close to a scenario like that…
Most of the Windows servers we use in production (we use Windows and linux but we’re slowly phasing out the former) do have poorer uptime than linux. That’s nothing to do with traffic – they just need rebooting more often.
That’s not an anti-Windows bias, just my experience. I imagine most folks working in a mixed environment would report something similar.