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Benchmarks For Linux And Solaris On SPARC Hardware?
NetJunkie asks: "We currently run several Web servers on Sun Ultra 5 workstations. We're interested in moving to Linux since there are some things we want to do which are expensive to do with Solaris. Are there any good benchmarks of Linux on Sparc against Solaris? We're rolling out PC hardware now, but we'd like to keep using our existing Sun boxes and good benchmarks will make this a much easier sell."
Gorkman
The Ultra 5 system architecture is basically the same as a PC - the UltraSparc IIi that's running the machine has a PCI bus interface built in (for PC folks, think of it as an integrated northbridge - and reminiscent of alpha 21064 series of chips)
Bandwidth wise, these machines are no better than a cheapo PC - their internal bus structure is nearly identical, as are most of the peripherals they use. As far as benchmarks go, check out:
http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html#q_1_27
For the most part, Linux on sparc will be around the same speed as Solaris on sparc, with variation
one way or the other on certain benchmarks due to OS design differences. I'd prefer Linux anyway - it uses a lot less disk space and memory to do the same things as solaris can.
That said, I'm beginning to wonder how viable Sun will be in the future. Their newest processor, the UltraSparc III, at 600 Mhz is slower in both integer and floating point than a P3 800 (according to the spec2000 benchmark, www.specbench.org). Yeah, its more efficent per clock cycle, but when you realize that the cheapest workstation with a single USIII 600 in it costs 10k, and you can easily build a Dual P3 800 system for under 2k, you soon realize that for sheer processing power, Sun is up a creek without a paddle.
BBK
We need to do some things with a *LOT* of very small files. UFS doesn't handle this well and the only option we've found is to buy a copy of Veritas File System for every Ultra 5 box....which is $3K/license.
I can do everything we want with Linux and ReiserFS for much less money.
I saw those benchmarks at the UltraLinux site but they are very old, and was curious if anyone had done some new ones.
I agree completely with the hardware. We can do so much more with a PC based server than with a Sun box. We aren't exactly using E10Ks here.
That said, I'm beginning to wonder how viable Sun will be in the future. Their newest processor, the UltraSparc III, at 600 Mhz is slower in both integer and floating point than a P3 800 (according to the spec2000 benchmark, www.specbench.org). Yeah, its more efficent per clock cycle, but when you realize that the cheapest workstation with a single USIII 600 in it costs 10k, and you can easily build a Dual P3 800 system for under 2k, you soon realize that for sheer processing power, Sun is up a creek without a paddle.
Where Sun wins against PCs is in the high end. Sun's chips and systems are designed to be very scalable; you'd have a lot of trouble building an x86-based SMP machine that worked as well with a thousand processors as a Starfire.
That having been said, Sun seems to be losing the price/performance war against the other makers of Big Iron. However, x86 is no threat (for the time being).
All of this applies to machines that must have good internal communications bandwidth. If communications bandwidth isn't an issue, then a cluster of cheap PCs with expensive network hardware will always win. YMMV.
FreeBSD doesn't have a sparc port yet. (in progress though) Perhaps you're thinking of NetBSD/sparc64 instead. Note that this is still a work in progress. Regardless, with the "soft dependencies" support under NetBSD, the small files issue is resolved, without needing to run the filesystem in async mode.
Have you considered the "cachefs" support in Solaris? I'm not really familiar with it, but I've seen references to using it for something like this.