Windows Server 2008 officially launched today with little fanfare; but the new enterprise-class operating system has been eagerly awaited by people who eagerly await operating systems, instead of going out and having a good time with their lives.
NetworkWorld has a thorough review of the W2K8 OS up on their site, but spends a bit of time tracking the performance of the network input output in various tests.
We tested network I/O performance using both emulated I/O and various traffic/assault tests (see How we did it) and found Windows 2008 Server performance has improved – and especially improved when Vista is the client….
The new stacks also have the ability to dynamically respond to communications latency in network connections as they possess the ability to dynamically change TCP packet window size, which allows a communication channel to be more efficiently stuffed with data.
This isn’t that surprising; we’ve covered the redesigned TCP/IP stack previously when Vista came out. What is interesting however, is that Vista provides the most benefit. Adoption of new server OSes tends to be slow, but so has adoption of Vista on work client computers, with many choosing to stay with XP SP2. For companies concerned about network performance; W2K8 might speed up adoption of desktop Vista. But conversely, Vista’s drawbacks (real and perceived) might slow down adoption of W2K8.
In our testing we found that under light loads, the effects in terms of speed of tasks like copying folders, streaming media and loading complex Web pages aren’t strongly demonstrated, but the effects under heavy loads, however, favors performance for Vista, strongly. Depending on the mixture of I/O (but pronounced under streaming media and heavy file copying), Vista can be as much as 43% faster than Windows XP SP2 in copying operations and 18% faster in opening concurrent streams.
This also means that there’s a two-class affinity for clients of Windows 2008 Server Editions – Vista and everyone else, including Windows XP SP2, MacOS (we used 10.4.10 and 10.5.2) or other SAMBA clients that use SAMBA 3.0.2+ connection methods. If you have a client with the new stack, you’re more efficient, and, therefore faster under higher loads, but you’re a second-class citizen if your stack isn’t up to date.
What I’d like to know is what, specifically, makes W2K8-server/Vista-client combinations so powerful. Is it just the compound TCP protocol? Are there kernel optimizations for network data processing? (I don’t have the technical knowledge to address those questions, I’m hoping that my readers will be able to share their theories and the results of any tests they may run.)
At any rate, while W2K8 is a significant milestone release, good or ill, the history of server software distribution usually means a slow rollout period – to the point where naming your operating system by year becomes almost a bitter irony; chances are most companies who use W2K3 will want to roll out W2K8 in 2009 at the earliest.
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