More than half the servers entered in the Web Race were Apple servers. So we did some further analysis on just the Apple servers. The chart below shows some results:
The first bars on the left show the results for all Apple servers. Then we looked at Europe compared to the USA. As you see, the European servers were a couple of seconds slower, with a wider spread of delivery times. For the remaining analysis, we focussed just on USA servers, to remove the transatlantic lag
Next we looked at connection speed. "T1 and up" connections were pretty much the same as the USA average. Only with 64K and less connections did we see a drop. Even so, we are only talking a second or so for fast pages. The best server on a low speed line could deliver the test page in 17.2 seconds (fast page average) with a spread of 5.2 seconds.
We also looked at clock rate, as a guide to CPU power. Only a couple of seconds separated the averages for old 25 Mhz Macs and the latest models. Machines like the LC 475 and Centris 610 could deliver the test page in about 16 seconds on a T1 line. So if the load is right, even an old Mac can give performance better than most servers out there.
Almost all the Mac servers were running Webstar. The right hand bar shows the results for three that were running MacHTTP. While only a small sample, they do look significantly worse than the others. They were old Macs, but for fast pages at least, they are five seconds slower than the other 25 Mhz models. We assume some of the delay was coming from the software in this case.
As we said on the main results page, none of the factors we looked at had a much effect as load on the server. While Macs were, on average, a second or two slower than some of the other boxes out there, the best ones were doing far better than other much more expensive servers.
Last updated 8th Sep 96 by td@timedancer.com.