Re: heads-up: preempt kernel and tux NO-GO

[J Sloan <jjs@pobox.com>]

Oliver Xymoron wrote:

> On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, J Sloan wrote:
>
> > I have been looking into the tux2 webserver -
> > Man, what a thing of beauty. A web benchmark
> > that sends the load on the web server to 150
> > when running apache results in a load average
> > of  maybe 2 when running tux, and much faster
> > results to boot - anyway, I digress....
>
> Loadavg isn't much of a measure here, it's a measure of the length of the
> runnable queue. If you've only got two processes because your server has a
> thread per processor, then yes, you'll see lower loadavg, but not lower
> load. A real measure would look at idle percentage and throughput.

That's easily done, and we know that load average
is a measure of tasks waiting to run - but rather
than throw more statistics around, I can say that
a Linux desktop running tux remains responsive
under a http load that would tend to monopolize it's
attention under apache -

Now I'm not knocking apache of course, it's the
standard these days, and there's nothing more
flexible or reliable - but there is indeed a niche
for a small, blindingly fast server like tux - and I
intend to explore that niche in coming months.

cu

jjs