NT (was Re: Windows, yeeuch)

I was the original architect of the Harvest cache, from which Squid is
derived. In the process of porting NetCache (e.g. Harvest) to NT,
we had to create a layer that mapped disk i/o events and network i/o
events into a single logical layer. Once we created this layer,
it took about six months to get NetCache up and running on NT.
The inconvenient part of our NT port (as our turly superb NT engineer tells me)
was that you couldn't perform non-blocking I/O on files in the same
way you'd do it for network connections.

I don't have exact performance numbers to compare our UNIX and NT
versions, but in my opinion, the NT kernel design is closer to the
set of system calls that we wanted for Harvest than was the set
of abstraction that UNIX provided. For example, we eliminated the
entire dnsserver monstrosity in our NT version. The dreaded select()
loop disappears, along with a limit on the number of open
file descriptors. I remember hearing our NT guy test 25,000 open
file descriptors one day. Of course, I grew up on UNIX and didn't
(and still don't) know much about NT when we started Harvest.

With that said, give it a spin. Our NT version is available from now.netapp.com
It speaks ICP and installs with a double click.

Peter

-- 
--
Peter Danzig               Architect, web proxy cache 
Network Appliance              Direct:    (408) 367-3402
2770 San Tomas Expressway       Fax:       (408) 367-3451  
Santa Clara, CA 95051             http://www.netapp.com