This week is an exciting one for Microsoft, particularly those of us who work on the Server & Tools Business-today we’re launching new versions of three cornerstone technologies-Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The theme is “Heroes Happen Here”-meant to recognize the valiant efforts of our IT Pros and Developers every day. These are the individuals who help make real, meaningful connections between IT and the business.


 


One of folks on my team who is making heroes happen is Greg Leake, who is a technical marketing director. In his own  words, Greg’s purpose is to “improve the lives of developers.” To do this, he has created a lab, and spends time on interoperability testing for Web Services as well as performance testing. No matter the time of day or night, it’s likely that you will find Greg in his lab, which means he probably also holds the record for most cups of coffee in one day.


 


Once again Greg jumped in the ring to find out just how far we could push the perf boundaries for Windows Server and .NET against other publicly available apps like IBM’s J2EE StockTrader perf application.


 


My favorite findings:


%u00b7         Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with .NET Framework 3.5 delivers 117% better throughput than IBM WebSphere 6.1 on Red Hat Linux for the Web Application Server test using the IBM-designed Trade 6.1 benchmark as well as delivers 93% better throughput for the remote services test.


%u00b7         On the Sun Microsystems’ WSTest Web Services benchmark, .NET StockTrader demonstrates 94% better throughput on Windows Server on processing Web Service requests and 86% better throughput performance for the EchoStruct operation.


 


The paper on MSDN presents the benchmark results of two key application server workloads:


1.     Trade 6.1 Application Server Benchmark created by IBM – This benchmark serves as IBM’s primary capacity planning tool for WebSphere, and as their primary performance sample application for Java Enterprise applications. The benchmarks detail throughput results for the IBM implementation vs. the functionally equivalent of the .NET Framework 3.5 implementation.


 


2.     WSTest Web Services 1.5 Benchmark, created by Sun Microsystems – This benchmark tests an application server’s performance as a Web Service Host, measuring the platforms ability to process Web Service operations involving HTTP/SOAP requests, isolating the networking stack, Web server integration, and XML serialization engines within the application server.


 


For more information and complete results, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/stocktrader! You can also download the application with the benchmark tests and try it yourself! Also, look out for the upcoming .NET StockTrader 2.0 in the next few weeks!