From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Sep 18 16:14:59 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mailgate.originative.co.uk (mailgate.originative.co.uk [194.217.50.228]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4208E37B505 for ; Mon, 18 Sep 2000 16:14:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: from originative.co.uk (lobster.originative.co.uk [194.217.50.241]) by mailgate.originative.co.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id EFEF11D140; Tue, 19 Sep 2000 00:14:47 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: <39C6A1E7.D342AD1B@originative.co.uk> Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 00:14:47 +0100 From: Paul Richards X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: j mckitrick Cc: Tony Finch , chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: netcraft 'serve-ey' References: <20000913200807.E97742@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <20000913233337.S6767@hand.dotat.at> <20000914162946.B9335@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org j mckitrick wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 11:33:37PM +0000, Tony Finch wrote: > | j mckitrick wrote: > | > > | >Does anyone know if the netcraft survey is accurate? I recently read > | >a comment that alleged it was not, and that (surprise) NT and Solaris > | >were the dominant server OSs. > | > | It is accurate in terms of what it measures, but what it measures is > | not necessarily what people think it measures. I.e. it counts virtual > | hosts and it's trivial to put thousands of virtual hosts on a shitty > | 486. Netcraft have other surveys which you must pay for which include > | numbers that are more difficult to obtain, like the number of physical > | machines with a given web server or OS, but even then its hard to tell > | the difference between an E10000 and a Sparc 1. > > So who can we believe when Netcraft says Unix/Apache dominates, while > entmag.com claims NT is the winner? I'm beginning to think they are all > lying, and all those fortune 500 companies are running boa as their > webservers. :) Are you talking about this article? http://www.entmag.com/displayarticle.asp?searchresult=1&ID=6150095626AM In this article they admit the truth about the survey results but then use the survey tools to test Fortune 500 companies, which tend to use NT. The claims that these results "turn the figures on their head" is to play fast and loose in the fastest and loosest way with the statistics. The survey is accurate within the parameters that previous people have said and there are fairly comprehensive explanations on the Netcraft web site as to how much weight should be given to the results (which is quite a lot but don't take individual probes as gospel). Paul Richards FreeBSD Services Ltd (ex Netcraft) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message