There is a good reason majority of the World-Wide-Web is run on 'Nix stacks -- and there is a good reason majority of servers in general are 'Nix stacks. Also, an overwhelming percentage of super-computers (I know we are talking about webservers, but it illustrates performance capabilities) are running a 'Nix stack.
There is also cost involved, as well as flexibility of the stack. With a 'Nix stack, it's infinitely flexible, not so much the case with a Microsoft stack. Also the default MS Stack comes with a lot of additional OS overhead that is not present in the 'Nix stack, which reduces any said box's scalability.
Without trying to turn this into some sort of flame war - I was merely trying to suggest that the MS stack was not/is not the best choice for a highly scalable website. Take the top 10 websites -- they all run on 'Nix. The top cloud providers (except MS Azure), all 'Nix. These are companies that can easily afford MS licensing, so that's not part of the equation.
A MS stack at this scale is unusual to say the least.
That's not to say it won't scale (as evidenced by the SE team), but it doesn't mean there isn't a better alternative that saves more money and scales better with less hardware, etc.
It will be very hard to get into a flamewar with me supporting the Microsoft side of things. That said, none of the links you posted prove anything regarding performance, they do prove something about total cost of ownership, which once you factor everything in leans towards Linux for most installations, however, just looking at the situation for SO seems to me to suggest that they were more comfortable doing the initial development on the stack they were most familiar with and when the license costs started to count against them they used Linux machines to scale out.
Which is a pretty smart decision. Whether an MS stack at this scale is unusual does not say anything at all about whether or not it performs well.
I think we agree for the SE team, given the founders were MS stack familiar, it makes sense.
However, I have to disagree on your assertion the 'Nix's are less performant than the MS stack. The top tier web companies are not running 'Nix because TCO is lower; for most of these companies licensing costs are negligible and if it helped to scale better, it may even save them money going with MS stack... but they don't go with a MS stack...
Sometimes a RHEL license can even cost more than a MS license. Couple that with an Oracle DB back-end, and you easily have a much more costly setup than the MS equivalent. It's not about the money.
These companies are choosing the 'Nix stack because it is performing in an entirely different level than the MS stack. Everything from tiny embedded systems with 64k ram, up to monster systems with TB's of ram.
> "I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other Operating Systems. Here Is Why."
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=74
This is provably not true.
http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_systems_use...
http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system/al...
There is a good reason majority of the World-Wide-Web is run on 'Nix stacks -- and there is a good reason majority of servers in general are 'Nix stacks. Also, an overwhelming percentage of super-computers (I know we are talking about webservers, but it illustrates performance capabilities) are running a 'Nix stack.
There is also cost involved, as well as flexibility of the stack. With a 'Nix stack, it's infinitely flexible, not so much the case with a Microsoft stack. Also the default MS Stack comes with a lot of additional OS overhead that is not present in the 'Nix stack, which reduces any said box's scalability.
Without trying to turn this into some sort of flame war - I was merely trying to suggest that the MS stack was not/is not the best choice for a highly scalable website. Take the top 10 websites -- they all run on 'Nix. The top cloud providers (except MS Azure), all 'Nix. These are companies that can easily afford MS licensing, so that's not part of the equation.
A MS stack at this scale is unusual to say the least.
That's not to say it won't scale (as evidenced by the SE team), but it doesn't mean there isn't a better alternative that saves more money and scales better with less hardware, etc.