How we did it

We installed each of the five GNU/Linux distributions on four server platforms:

•  An HP Proliant DL580 (4-1.8GHz Xeon CPUs; Compaq Smart Array 5; twin Gigabit Ethernet ports; Emulex Fibre Channel adapter; 2G byte DRAM; with two Compaq hard disks)

•  An HP Proliant DL380 (2, 733MHz Pentium III CPUs; Compaq Smart Array 3; twin Gigabit Ethernet ports; 1G byte DRAM)

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We installed each of the five GNU/Linux distributions on four server platforms:

•  An HP Proliant DL580 (4-1.8GHz Xeon CPUs; Compaq Smart Array 5; twin Gigabit Ethernet ports; Emulex Fibre Channel adapter; 2G byte DRAM; with two Compaq hard disks)

•  An HP Proliant DL380 (2, 733MHz Pentium III CPUs; Compaq Smart Array 3; twin Gigabit Ethernet ports; 1G byte DRAM)

•  An HP Proliant ML330 (1.6GHz Pentium 4 CPU; Compaq SCSI disk interface; single Gigabit Ethernet port; 1G byte DRAM)

•  A Gateway 1U Server (1GHz Pentium 4 CPU; internal ATA-100 interface; 10/100 port; two drives)

The servers were connected via a Gigabit Ethernet switch.

We installed all five total distributions on these five platforms, but focused most of our performance tests on the HP Proliant DL580 platform. We tested to see if each platform's hardware was successfully detected, and whether options varied from platform to platform. We also checked to see if various disk configuration options were available for RAID .

We set up the HP Proliant DL580 for load-balanced Gigabit Ethernet network cards, then used a Spirent Communications /CAW Web Avalanche to send increasing amounts of traffic to the server for our load-balancing test. We ramped up traffic over 5 minutes to see if traffic balanced, and as both distributions use the same applications to balance traffic, we detected no real differences between them. We also used this test setup to detect recovery from a cable failure.

We used Spirent Communications' WebAvalanche benchmarks to conduct our Web performance tests. We ran tests to determine the number of transactions processed per second, as well as the maximum number of TCP connections per second and found them to be good for this class of processor/speed.

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