[toomuchtodo]

Wow, great. Stackoverflow and Newegg.

Amazon? Linux. Google? Linux. Apple? Linux. Large Hadron Collider? All. Linux.

Using Microsoft server in a production environment? Gonna have a bad time. There's a reason most sane people don't use it in important places.

I don't hate on Microsoft server products because its in fashion. Its because I like to sleep at night.

[pjmlp]

> Large Hadron Collider? All. Linux.

True if you are speaking about the custom built machines doing real time data analysis.

However, many users have Mac OS X and Windows as their desktop machines.

When I was there (2003-2004), quite a few researchers were even moving away from LaTeX to Word and FrameMaker.

There are a few ASP.NET servers at CERN.

[toomuchtodo]

I was at Tier1 (Fermilab). All the servers were Linux, and everyone's desktop was either a Mac or a Linux box.

[pjmlp]

Atlas HLT EP group.

[mattmanser]

It would be more enlightening and people might agree with you if you told us what was going wrong to cause you such pain?

I have had many windows servers and often you can almost just forget about them entirely once they're setup, which takes all of like 2 hours even if you're using a whole new stack.

[toomuchtodo]

Excellent point. I apologize for my brevity in my previous posts.

I agree that you can't color Microsoft's server offerings by their older products (Server 2000, 2003). I do agree that 2008/2012 are much more solid products comparitively speaking, but I still would not use them in a production environment for several reasons:

Debugging: Have you ever attempted to debug edge case issues in a Windows server environment? I don't mean ASP/.Net issues, but I mean issues within Server itself (random reboots, OS hang, etc). Sometimes, your only answer is "Windows does that occasionally". I have Linux servers with uptime measured in thousands of days, almost as stable as the solid state networking gear.

Cost: I worked on the CMS detector for data taking at the LHC. We had over 6000 servers, not only doing data crunching but also providing REST services, database services (for both data and parallel file system metadata). Everything was Linux. The licensing cost alone for just the Windows OS on all of those machines would have been massive.

Patching/Upgrades: The only time you need to reboot a Linux box is when you're upgrading/patching the Kernel. Windows boxes? Patch Tuesday. Rarely have software updates broken a Linux box, and if they do, its much easier to revert back to a previously known good config.

I can go into greater detail if necessary. I agree, 12 years of experience is just a drop in the bucket, and my experiences are anecdotal in nature. I just rarely see (if ever) someone using Microsoft software in missions critical environments.

[adventured]

I'm curious what the specs were on those 6,000 CMS boxes? Do you happen to recall?

[toomuchtodo]

I don't, but I could probably check my email. I was responsible for benchmarking boxes from major manufacturers for the selection process (which ended up being a waste of time, because only one of the vendors met our price criteria).

[dragontamer]

Amazon and Google write their own custom code. Hell, all of the major "linux" users have hand-built infrastructure that they don't share with the open source community.

Stackoverflow and Newegg use a vanilla Microsoft Stack.