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irseg · 10-27-2004, 08:59 AM

I like PHP. I have experience with C/C++ and Perl, so it was extremely easy to learn.

However I recently got a job at a company that's almost entirely Windows-based. I've been rewriting a lot of classic ASP stuff into ASP.NET+C# (while learning all three as I go.. good times!). As far as I'm concerned ASP.NET is a klugdy, slow, unintuitive pain in the ass.

The IT director told me that they go with Windows because it's so much easier to administer. Hah. Sure everything looks cute and simple and easy and intuitive on the surface, but good luck if you want to do anything even remotely custom. Perfect example--I had to set up Linux and Windows boxes to append a copyright footer to all websites on the servers.

With Linux/Apache, it was a matter of installing mod_layout and adding 4 lines to httpd.conf. I had a problem where the uncompressed footer would be applied to compressed PHP sites, but that was remedied with a directive telling it not to append to files with php MIME types.

On Windows/IIS, it looked incredibly easy. An "Enable document footer" checkbox. Chose the footer file, checked the box, everything looked great. Until I found that .asp and other dynamic pages didn't get a footer. Even worse, for whatever strange reason, the footer was being appended to .exe files so people were downloading corrupted programs from us.

OK, next step-- IIS has ISAPI filter capability. I spent about 2 weeks trying to figure it out and make it work consistently thanks in large part to the extremely sparse documentation. Everything looked great-- it appended the footer to files with text/html MIME types. All was well on my test computer (WinXP with IIS 5.1). Threw it on an IIS 5.0 box. Looked great. Reloaded a few times, it started getting slower and slower. Then IIS crashed. Tried again, noticed IIS was consuming 15 more megabytes of memory every time the 200-byte test page was reloaded. Made sure I was properly using the ISAPI memory management functions, everything was good. Eventually said screw that server, I'll see if one running IIS 6 works. Nope, the filter wouldn't even load. Showed it to some other Windows programmers, nobody could figure out WTF was wrong. In fact, code samples from other websites and even MS themselves exhibited the same exact random, IIS-crashing behavior.

Eventually we ended up running everything except .ASP pages thru the ASP.NET preprocessor and setting it up to attach a footer that way, so now everything has all that overhead now.

That's pretty much been my overall experience having adminned the two platforms. I prefer Linux not because I'm some raving anti-big-corporation MS-hating zealot, but because it just friggin' works.

10-27-2004, 08:59 AM	#8 (permalink)
irseg Junkie Location: Florida	I like PHP. I have experience with C/C++ and Perl, so it was extremely easy to learn. However I recently got a job at a company that's almost entirely Windows-based. I've been rewriting a lot of classic ASP stuff into ASP.NET+C# (while learning all three as I go.. good times!). As far as I'm concerned ASP.NET is a klugdy, slow, unintuitive pain in the ass. The IT director told me that they go with Windows because it's so much easier to administer. Hah. Sure everything looks cute and simple and easy and intuitive on the surface, but good luck if you want to do anything even remotely custom. Perfect example--I had to set up Linux and Windows boxes to append a copyright footer to all websites on the servers. With Linux/Apache, it was a matter of installing mod_layout and adding 4 lines to httpd.conf. I had a problem where the uncompressed footer would be applied to compressed PHP sites, but that was remedied with a directive telling it not to append to files with php MIME types. On Windows/IIS, it looked incredibly easy. An "Enable document footer" checkbox. Chose the footer file, checked the box, everything looked great. Until I found that .asp and other dynamic pages didn't get a footer. Even worse, for whatever strange reason, the footer was being appended to .exe files so people were downloading corrupted programs from us. OK, next step-- IIS has ISAPI filter capability. I spent about 2 weeks trying to figure it out and make it work consistently thanks in large part to the extremely sparse documentation. Everything looked great-- it appended the footer to files with text/html MIME types. All was well on my test computer (WinXP with IIS 5.1). Threw it on an IIS 5.0 box. Looked great. Reloaded a few times, it started getting slower and slower. Then IIS crashed. Tried again, noticed IIS was consuming 15 more megabytes of memory every time the 200-byte test page was reloaded. Made sure I was properly using the ISAPI memory management functions, everything was good. Eventually said screw that server, I'll see if one running IIS 6 works. Nope, the filter wouldn't even load. Showed it to some other Windows programmers, nobody could figure out WTF was wrong. In fact, code samples from other websites and even MS themselves exhibited the same exact random, IIS-crashing behavior. Eventually we ended up running everything except .ASP pages thru the ASP.NET preprocessor and setting it up to attach a footer that way, so now everything has all that overhead now. That's pretty much been my overall experience having adminned the two platforms. I prefer Linux not because I'm some raving anti-big-corporation MS-hating zealot, but because it just friggin' works.