What's more, benchmarks can vary widely in how they measure a server. The upshot of all this is that Web server benchmarks must be considered in a very limited manner. A benchmark for a server running on a particular operating system, on a particular hardware configuration, focuses only on that specific setup. The further the setup deviates from the tested habitat, the less meaningful the benchmark becomes. Measuring Common Sense Where hard numbers cannot tell the whole story, it is best to use common sense to fill in the gaps.
Products integrated in homogenous environments are often easier to bring up to speed.
In such an environment, it may well produce the best benchmarks. On the other hand, common sense tells us that a Microsoft Web server alone is not the only way to run a high performance Web site, considering the wide deployment of both Netscape and especially the free Apache Web server on extremely high volume sites. Yet, whereas Apache is an awkward fit in a Microsoft infrastructure, it wears like a comfy and warm autumn sweater in Unix environments, where it is most commonly found. We have found the benchmarking tools listed below to be helpful when testing different Web servers in various environments. When tested on the same operating systems, hardware, and network connections, these benchmarks can reveal important differences between Web servers used in a given system .