Comparative Analysis of the Impact of Server Operating Systems on Web Site Performance

This work analyses the impact of the server operating system on the overall performance of hosted web sites. In the paper, we are presenting the results of comparing the influence of the two most common server operating system families, Windows and the GNU/Linux distributions. Through experiments, we have collected data based on which we have concluded the impact of these operating systems on the performance of a web site developed using the most commonly used web platform - WordPress. The experiment was set up in such a way as to eliminate the impact of hardware on our measurements, which is done by using the same hardware, network and matching conditions. The experiment was conducted with a large number of repetitions to reduce relative errors in measurements. The performance analysis covers files of different sizes and types, including text and multimedia content typical for modern web sites.