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发信人: saka (机器猫), 信区: Linux
标  题: The Mindcraft fiasco
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Sat Apr 24 09:51:25 1999) WWW-POST

Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 03:45:36 -0400
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net, editors@linuxtoday.com, malda@slashdot.org
Subject: The Mindcraft fiasco

Microsoft's latest FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) tactic may be
backfiring.

A 21 April ITWeb story [1] reported results by a benchmarking shop
called Mindcraft that supposedly showed NT to be faster than Linux at
SMB and Web service.  The story also claimed that technical support
for tuning the Linux system had been impossible to find.

Previous independent benchmarks (such as [2]) have found Linux and
other Unixes to be dramatically faster and more efficient than NT, and
independent observers (beginning with a celebrated InfoWorld article in
1998 [3]) have lauded the Linux community's responsiveness to support
problems.  Linux fans smelled a rat somewhere (uttering responses
typfied by [4]), and amidst the ensuing storm of protest some
interesting facts came to light.

1. The benchmark had been paid for by Microsoft. The Mindcraft press
release failed to mention this fact.

2. Mindcraft did in fact get a useful answer [5] to its request for
help tuning the Linux system.  But they did not answer the request for
more information, neither did they follow the tuning suggestions given
Also, they forged the reply email address to conceal themselves --
the connection was made after the fact by a Usenetter who noticed that
the unusual machine configuration described in the request exactly matched
that of the test system in the Mindcraft results.

3. Red Hat, the Linux distributor Mindcraft says it asked for help,
reports that it got one phone call from them on the installation-help
line, which isn't supposed to answer post-installation questions about
things like advanced server tuning.  Evidently Mindcraft's efforts to
get help tuning the system were feeble -- at best incompetent, at
worst cynical gestures.

4. An entertainingly-written article [6] by the head of the
development team for Samba (one of the key pieces of Linux software
involved in the benchmark) described how Mindcraft could have done a
better job of tuning.  The article revealed that one of Mindcraft's
Samba tweaks had the effect of slowing their Linux down quite drastically.

5. Another Usenet article [7] independently pointed out that Mindcraft had
deliberately chosen a logging format that imposed a lot of overhead on
Apache (the web sever used for the Linux tests).

So far, so sordid -- a fairly standard tale of Microsoft paying to get
exactly the FUD it wants from a nominally independent third party.
But the story took a strange turn today (22 Mar) when Microsoft
spokesperson Ian Hatton effectively admitted [8] that the test had
been rigged!  "A very highly-tuned NT server" Mr. Hatton said "was
pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server".

He then attempted to spin the whole episode around by complaining that
Microsoft and its PR company had received "malicious and obscene"
email from Linux fans and slamming this supposed "unprofessionalism".
One wonders if Hatton believes it would be "unprofessional" to address
strong language to a burglar caught in the act of nipping the family
silver.

In any case, Microsoft's underhanded tactics seem (as with its clumsy
"astroturf" campaign against the DOJ lawsuit) likely to come back to
haunt it.  The trade press had largely greeted the Mindcraft results with
yawns and skepticism even before Hatton's admission.  And it's hard to
see how Microsoft will be able to credibly quote anti-Linux benchmarks
in the future after this fiasco.

[1] "Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 out performs Linux"
http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/computing/1999/9904211045.asp

[2] "Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX"
<http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt.html>

[3] "1997 Product of the Year"
<http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayTC.pl?/97poy.supp.htm>

[4] "Mindcraft Reality Check"
http://www.linux-hw.com/~eric/mindcraft.html

[5] "Re: Need help with performance"
<http://x14.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=453900037&CONTEXT=924792680.3
12147973&hitnum=7>

[6] "Trust no one: How Mindcraft could have made a better Linux file server"
<http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-04/lw-04-mindcraft.html>

[7] "It's the old DNS logging trick, Re: Is NT really 3.7 times faster than
Linux ?"
<http://x13.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=qs]/getdoc.xp?AN=469420638&CONTEXT=924804285.1
636696091&hitnum=6>

[8] "Outrage at Microsoft's independent, yet sponsored NT 4.0/Linux
research"
<http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/enterprise/1999/9904221410.asp>

--
                <a href="Eric">http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

I don't like the idea that the police department seems bent on keeping
a pool of unarmed victims available for the predations of the criminal
class.
         -- David Mohler, 1989, on being denied a carry permit in NYC

--
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