[luffy]

For kicks, I deployed the same app on Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 2008 R2 micro instances on AWS. I chose the plain Windows instance - with no software ( ie, IIS & .NET) pre installed. No database is used in this app.

I had the mono/Ubuntu version up and running in about 30 minutes. The longest part of the install was that I chose to use Mono 2.6.7 which isn't officially supported, so you need to do some work to install it. The app was deployed using FastCGI and Nginx.

It took about 90 minutes to get the Windows 2008 version running. Most of which time was spent waiting for the instance to start and waiting for the bloody Platform Installer (worst app ever!) to do whatever it does.

The moral of this story: the Windows micro instances are unusable. But to scale vertically, use Windows. To scale horizontally, or if you are cheap||frugal, give mono/Ubuntu a shot. Can't wait to see what moving to LLVM is going to do to mono's performance.