Some possibly meaningless comparisons

[Chong Yu Meng]

Hi all,

Not really a technical problem but I thought I'd share some recent
observations.

Just completed a project using products from that company from Redmond
(hey, I have to eat too!), and I found a lot of interesting things that
have changed and some interesting differences. 

One of the major things I've noticed is that, with Active Directory,
Microsoft seems to be becoming more like UNIX in many ways -- its
getting more flexible but also more complex, and for it to be deployed
competently, you need to have real experience, instead of the
"hobbyists" who used to be able to do this kind of thing.

One major difference however seems to be the way it uses the CPU. For
the UNIX servers I used to deploy (ah, happy days!), and my home Linux
server, I'm used to seeing short bursts of CPU utilization, and then it
goes back down to some average level. For multi-processor systems, the
behavior is the same. For those rare moments when the system does lock
up, the CPU utilization normally hits and stays at 100% (example: when
the Java garbage collector is running). For Windows, I assumed that
hyper-threading was going to solve those strange periods when the system
just hangs. But when I was troubleshooting one particular performance
problem, I found that the CPU utilization was low and stayed low (<10%)
even when the system hung up. It didn't matter if there was one
processor or a dual core ! It just seemed to be waiting for something to
happen, which is very frustrating, because the only way to break out of
this is (typically) a full reboot. 

I think the day is not far off when the perceived "user-friendliness" of
Windows compared to UNIX will disappear. Already, the argument that
commercial software is better supported is losing its truth, especially
in my part of the world, where it is fairly typical to be fobbed off by
tech "support". 

Anyway, just my 2 cents!

Regards