Windows Server 2008 launched
Windows Server 2008 officially launched yesterday 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; Vista’s redesigned TCP/IP stack was previously covered in detail all over the web 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 testing it was 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.
