Not in code

I did a search for my website in a few popular search engines and found this cached page in yahoo which indicates that Hiremaga.com was in the Top 50 sites with the longest running systems (without a reboot) in May 2004 according to Netcraft

Hiremaga.com used to be hosted on a Red Hat Linux 9 server (that I administered myself ad hoc). This server hosted my site and various other websites running on Apache, PHP, Tomcat 5 etc with MySQL as a DB. It was generally up2date with the latest patches and I was somehow able to get through almost an entire year without needed to reboot the server.

Hiremaga.com is now hosted on an Windows Server 2003 box which has been restarted atleast 3-4 times since it was first setup about 3 months ago, mostly to install operating system updates which needed a reboot.

I concede that I was pretty slack with the old Linux server, in that I did not install any kernel updates (I’m only say this now because I’m no longer on that box). This probably had something to do with why it never needed a reboot, however it’s still an impressive(interesting?) achievement. The contrast between the two operating systems is worth noting – this graph for medical-entrance.com.au is worth taking a look at. Hiremaga.com has run of the same server as medical-entrance.com.au for the last few years so the graph is also valid Hiremaga.com

I’m not really drawing any major conclusions from this because it’s a pretty one dimensional comparison, however the stark contrast between the need to reboot on the two operating systems is interesting. I’m not really a qualified systems admin so it’s entirely possible that I didn’t reboot the Linux box when it actually needed one, having said that I’m not exactly clueless when it comes to Linux and I never found the need to do this :)

My early impressions of Windows Server 2003 have been very positive, especially compared with it’s infamous predecessor. I’ll try to blog a bit more on Windows 2003 and how I feel it’s rates against Linux as a server OS (for my needs anyway), sometime in the near future.

I will end this post with a brief list of “some”(not all) of my reasons for switching from Linux to Windows Server 2003:

• Red Hat stopped supporting Red Hat 9 and I was forced to choose a new OS or upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise
• The other techs who would be doing some of the server administration had never used Linux
• Almost all of the reviews that I have read about Windows Server 2003 have been positive
• We use Windows on all of our servers at work and I wanted to develop my administrative skills a bit further with this OS (almost all my prior admin experience is on Linux)
• The person who the server is primarily for was considering ASP.NET as the technology platform for some of their web applications and I’m not yet convinced with the commercial viability of MONO
• I was very curious about how it(Win2k3) would stack up against Linux in real practical use as a Server OS