Linux versus Windows - what does your site run on? - Online news from MSO.net's Net.Matters - June 2007

Research conducted by server monitoring firm, WatchMouse looked at the performance of around 1500 websites based in 5 European countries (UK, Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Sweden), covering 28 different business sectors.  Over 75 per cent of all websites are run using either Linux/Apache or Windows/IIS.  The WatchMouse study claims that although the Windows based platform is the more widely used, it is the Apache platform running Linux that gives the better performance. 

As well as establishing which platform gave the best uptime result, the research uncovered country preferences for each server platform.  UK companies largely favour Windows-based systems, with 59 per cent of the websites studied (Linux followed with 17 per cent, Solaris with 15 per cent, BSD with 3 per cent and Unix with 1 per cent of websites).  Germany, in comparison had less than 20 per cent of the websites surveyed running on a Windows-based platform. 

The WatchMouse survey also showed that two-thirds of the websites had an availability of less than 99.9 per cent - this isn't good news as it represents at least 8 hours downtime per year.  WatchMouse's chief technology officer, Mark Pors explains:

"Even though the companies in our study seem to prefer Windows over Linux, our research shows that they would be better off using Linux/Apache-based websites.  Research has shown that most web users are very impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a web page to load.  Organisations need to become more aware of the impact the choice of web-server platform can have on their overall availability and performance." 


Site Performance Index for UK Websites by Business Sector

Source: WatchMouse, March 2007