Introducing TUX, the cute and cuddly IIS killer

I, for one, will never forget the day a certain benchmark report from Mindcraft surfaced about a year and a half ago. It showed my beloved Linux getting smashed by Windows NT in file and web serving benchmarks. A lot of things came out of those benchmarks - accusations of cheating, more benchmarks, and finger pointing to name a few - but a year and a half later, an answer to those benchmarks has arrived.

This summer the SPECweb99 results were published and out of nowhere, a Linux webserver was now *creaming* its Windows 2000 counterpart. This for the most part caught the Linux community(myself included) way off-guard. A year later, we had completely turned the tables on the Microsoft offering, now beating them at their own benchmarking game. What was even more of a shock was that the webserver that turned in the incredible results wasn't our tried and true Apache webserver, but a newcomer called Tux.

Tux is mostly the work of Ingo Molnar from RedHat. TUX is a kernel-based, threaded, extremely high performance HTTP server. It is able to efficiently and safely serve both static and dynamic data. It is a new breed of webserver that is very closely integrated with the new Linux kernel(2.4). This close integration between OS and webserver(as IIS has shown) leads to increased performance. You can read more about the hardcore details of Tux and how it uses integration with the Linux kernel to achieve such high levels of performance in this interview with Tux's author on Slashdot.

Since the SPECweb99 results this summer, many people have been eagerly awaiting a quality release version of TUX to test, tune, and try on their own high traffic webservers. Today, the first binary release of TUX is available for all to download, try, and use. You can download it from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/tux/tux-1.0/ and try it on your Red Hat 6.2 or 7.0 systems now. Support for other distributions is sure to follow.