The Great Web Race of 1996

is over..

And the winners are:

First. 13.6 seconds.

A DEC Alpha at http://www.nwoca.ohio.gov/

Second. 13.6 seconds.

A DEC VAXstation 4000 at http://bnlstb.bio.bnl.gov/

Third. 13.8 seconds.

A SGI Challenge L Server at http://reality.sgi.com/

Our Thanks to all those who took part!

Times are for the delivery of fast pages. Since the times were so close, we used the spread between fast and slow pages to resolve the first place tie. As you see, the best performing servers in the Race were workstations on high speed connections. This is as expected.

The surprising news is that even a small server that is well matched to its load can perform very well. Some Intel 486 or Mac 68040 servers proved capable of delivering our test page in under 16 seconds. On the other hand, an overloaded Sun Ultra was taking over 90 seconds to deliver some pages. Site load proved crucial to delivery performance.

Detailed Web Race Results and Analysis

Web Server Configuration Guide

Last updated 16 Sep 96 by td@timedancer.com.