Month: August 2003

Nearly two-thirds of your base are belong to Apache

While doing some research in my capacity as Tucows’ TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator, a cool mish-mash of developer relations, Open Source Nerd Wrangler and playing the part of “The Cheat” to Ross Rader’s “Strong Bad”), I hit the Netcraft site to see how the server market was divided.

The latest Netcraft Web Server Survey — the August 2003 edition, which marks the 8th anniversary of the survey — says that Apache HTTP Server has its biggest share of the market ever, with 63.98% of the nearly 43 million servers surveyed. That’s about 27.4 million servers.

(For comparison’s sake, the first Netcraft survey back in August 1995 found less than 20,000 sites. That’s three freakin’ orders of magnitude’s difference in less than a decade.)

According to Netcraft, Apache has a bigger than two-to-one lead over Microsoft’s server offerings — they have 23.75% of the servers, or 10.2 million servers. When counting Microsoft servers, Netcraft lumps all the various flavours of IIS (Internet Information Services) and PWS (Personal Web Server) together. This is a 2.2% drop in IIS’ market share that is attributed to Network Solutions’ migrating the rest of their domain parking system back to Solaris from a Windows based system hosted at Interland.

No! Over half your base are belong to Microsoft!

I mentioned this to Boss Ross (who reports to Boss’ Boss Noss):

Me: Hey, Ross. Seen the latest Netcraft survey? Apache has its biggest-ever share of the server market.

Ross: So who did Microsoft take their bigger share from?

Me: Bigger share? They lost almost a million servers from their July numbers!

Ross: Check out Scoble’s blog. He said IIS is on the upswing.

I hit the Scobleizer, and sure enough, he links to a guy quoting the Port80 survey of the top 1000 corporations’ web servers. According to that survey, IIS has the lead, with 53% of the share, easily trouncing Netscape at 18.6% and Apache at 16%.

So who’s right?

Probably both.

The Netcraft survey is Internet-wide, which accounts for anyone running a server, which ranges from my neighbour Hector all the way to Amazon, while the Port80 survey is restricted to Fortune 1000 companies.

In other words, if you limit your scope to the suits, all your base are belong to Microsoft. However, if you expand your scope to include the suits and everyone else, including Google, the Internet Archive, a zillion blogs, hosting services, DNS, and anything else that doesn’t wear a tie and say stuff like “That’s not on my action item list!” and “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes!”, things are quite different.

Suddenly I’m reminded of Danny O’Brien’s recent remarks:

Also the Microsoft stuff continues to have its head stuck right up the ass of corporate America. One of my big bones with MS stuff is that it always makes me feel like I’m eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm. All of their software is designed to help busy executives plan their lives. Everyone I know uses it to try and write birthday cards and chat with their friends. When people use Microsoft Office they use it anywhere but in an office. Microsoft knows this – but it also knows that the money comes from their corporate clients, so there’s a limit to how much it can bend its software toward a wider customer base. Ultimately when you use MS software, you’re not the end user MS perceives at all: we’re just living off the scraps Microsoft leaves out after feeding its big customers.

Yes, Microsoft has its games division, but I get the feeling that games are for the gaps in the borth-school-work-death cycle of good little consumers.

Where’s the software that lets you create — and no, I don’t just mean slideshows covering your ass for last quarter’s losses? I don’t think it’s coming from them.

And speaking of cubicle farms, I have a TPS report to file. Later!

Recommended Reading

Ross’ take on the whole stats thing. “Personally, I’d love to see a number that quantifies, in absolute dollar amounts, the percentage of ecommerce that each platform is responsible for faciliating. Or maybe, total HTTP gets…or how about security patches per second? Segfaults per month? ”

The Adventures of Action Item. D’you think anyone in Redmond dresses up as him for Hallowe’en?

All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Oh, the memes of early 2001…

Every now and again, I reserve the right to taunt a friend mercilessly. This is one of those times.

My friend Danny O’Brien was trying to decide whether to use Perl or Python for a project. He was originally leaning towards Perl; I blame the fact that he might have been living in California too long, or perhaps he’s inhaled too many fumes while changing his lovely daughter’s diapers.

He writes:

I’m utterly torn between Perl and Python. My first choice in this case would be Python, because bad Python code doesn’t seem to be quite so personal. I’ve seen people spit blood at other coder’s Perl, just because it’s not the way that they would do it. Perl demands rather more sympathy with your predecessor than does Python. With Python, it’s just more code to stare at.

This sort of statement makes me imagine Danny at an electrical engineering class: “But professor, how does Kirchoff’s Voltage Law make you feel?”

Danny’s statement seems to imply that Perl requires you to know the previous programmer’s “headspace” in order to be able to maintain his or her code. In other words, the language alone does not communicate the author’s intent without the kind of exegesis usually reserved for studies of the subtext of inside jokes that might have appeared in the Gnostic Gospels.

You wanna get all touchy-feely and sympathetic with the previous developer’s “inner child”, don’t read their code. Instead, why don’t you two curl up in front of the TV and watch Oprah, then go hop in the hot tub and kiss?!

What is this, the Matt Damon/Ben Affleck school of coding?

That said, your successor does need to actually know the language. Most of the people I can imagine maintaining this code will know Perl but not Python. Python doesn’t take that long to learn, but reading Python to take on someone else’se project just isn’t much *fun*. Sitting down to learn someone’s Perl, while tough, does teach you about the way they were thinking when they wrote the application. Python’s clarity, I think, cuts down on its expressiveness in depicting why certain decisions were made. When I had to hunker down and learn POE or Moveable Type, for instance, I came away with a very deep understanding of how it was supposed to work. It was fun, albeit time-consuming. I sometimes have problems doing the same with slabs of Python code, just because they can be very lacking in personality.

What you call personality, I call distraction. Yes, I’m probably bound to find out more about the previous coder’s approach to programming by their Perl code. I might even able to ratiocinate their astrological sign or whether they’re dominant or submissive. But damned if I can figure out what the hell they were trying to get the code to do.

Python’s clarity is what I like about it. My first Python project — an actual paying one with an actual deadline for an actual system to be used by actual users — required me to pick up where the original developer, who had to work on other parts of the system, left off. The clarity of Python actually allowed me to see his design decisions; the obscurity of Perl would’ve been a hindrance.

That said, I’m not paid to be a programmer. What is fun is a hobby can be skull-crackingly frustrating in a job with a deadline.

Even when I have plenty of time to kill (hah!), I’d rather have a language that let me concentrate on my task and less on the language’s idiosyncracies.

Danny, being the kinesthetic sort, learned his lesson by peeing on the electric fence:

Now, a couple of days into it, I’ve begun to seriously reconsider. I’m nowhere near the Mason bit of the application, and I’m getting continually bogged down in Perl style issues that really don’t have anything to do with what I’m trying to write.

To be honest, I think this is my Perl rustiness kicking in; and I think it may go away after a few more days hacking. Worse, though, is the effect of something I thought would be a real boon – CPAN. There’s a bunch of useful utilities there that I’d love to suck in and use in my program. But they all have different idioms – all of which I have to sit down and learn. Plus there’s the whole dependency issue: sooner or later I’m going to have to install all of this on the working server, and there’s a real penalty to be paid for being dependent on a lot of scattered Perl modules. Will they work? Will they still be maintained? Which of alternative implementations should I choose?

Not into the touchy-feely thing anymore, are we, John Gray?

Oh, I’m being cruel now. Group hug!

(I’m kidding, Danny.)

Luckily, he eventually made the right decision, and I’m happy to report that things are working well for him.

Otherwise, I might have to mock him even more.