We tested the SCO OpenLinux 6.0 server on several systems for compatibility ranging from an HP-DL140 server with two 3.06Ghz Intel Xeon CPUs and 1G byte memory, through our common test platform, a Polywell 2200s/2 machine comprising two 2.8Ghz Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon 64 CPUs with 4G byte dynamic RAM.

We tested connectivity with OpenServer's SAMBA 3.0.13 SMB-connectivity method with and tested it with Windows XP, 2000 and 98/SE clients, as well as Mac (Powerbook G4 and dual G4 desktop) running MacOS X10.3 and 10.4. We also connected via FreeBSD.

We tested VxFS to see how its speed compared with NFS V3, as well as Windows NT File System and found VxFS faster than all three. We also extensively tested encrypted file systems, and found that it had little real effect on system performance, even when we spawned many I/O transactions with shell scripts.

We also tested OpenServer 6 with our SSL transaction tests, using OpenSSL as a backend to the Apache server supplied by SCO. These tests spawn large blocks of users within the Spirent Web Avalanche appliance and then request SSL page builds (via http get requests) to verify the page is built while spawning new sessions from the built-user-list. This exercises encryption, builds large numbers of concurrent instances of SSL-backed sessions, and eventually exercises disk cache and disk cache coherency. All this emulates basic Web server functionality. We had to modify certain configuration files that pointed to correct file locations, but otherwise did not modify settings associated with Apache performance to do the test.

Additionally, to measure the operating system's ability to build and hold network connections, we ran tests to determine the number of transactions processed per second, as well as the maximum number of TCP connections per second, the operating system could establish and maintain.

Back to Clear Choice Test: SCO's OpenServer 6.0