Sun Solaris Vs Linux: The x86 Smack-down

JigSaw writes "Tony Bourke put together a long article, benchmarking File System, System, Compilation, OpenSSL and Web Performance for both Linux and Solaris on x86 hardware. While SPARC's Solaris is said to be more optimized than its x86 counterpart on the other hand so is Linux 2.6 compared to 2.4. Solaris-x86 performed well in the tests, but Linux 2.4 seems to win most of the tests and the overall impressions."

Comments

Why does this get put under developers?

[bombadillo]

In my experience the majority of Developers don't have an in depth knowledge of OS and Hardware performance. The System Administrators almost always have a much better understanding of OS performance. The majority of developers I have worked with are Java developers. Perhaps it is different for other languages. However, shouldn't this be under a Systems Admin category?

bah

[DNS-and-BIND]

Who the heck runs Solaris on a crappy dual-processor machine? Solaris doesn't really even begin to show benefits until it gets at least 8 processors. It just keeps going up, and up, and up.

Solaris/Intel is just a toy that grabs a few extra customers that Sun would have lost otherwise. Boy, you should see it when linux noobs get their hands on it. They get really angry when you tell them "your hardware must be listed on the Hardware Compatibility List". I've seen venomous diatribes directed at "sucky" Sun and its "sucky" OS for not having video drivers for whatever the most expensive game-playing graphics board is these days. And if they actually get the system to install and they see CDE...oh man.

I don't hang on #solaris any more, but damn we would get the same reactions over, and over, and over about Solaris/Intel.

Re:Sun on x86

[n3rd]

Was Sun really serious about Solaris on x86?

On and off, evidently back on again. I've heard that back in the mid 90's a decent amount of customers used Solaris x86 on Compaq's. After a while they dropped support and over the next few years. Anyone confirm or deny (I know the second part is true)?

Here is a recent press release about Solaris x86. Disregard the marketing garbage, there's a lot of it.

They name a decent amount of customers, a biomedical place is one of them. Perhaps a transition from SPARC to x86 for sheer speed would be cheaping going from Solaris to Solaris instead of Solaris to Linux, that is assuming Solaris on x86 meets their needs.

Also, according to this article they have Solaris x86 for Opteron. Perhaps this would help convince big graphics apps such as Photoshop make a port to Opteron since Linux and the BSD's are already there.

They also have a POWER4+'esqe chip coming out in the first half of the new year. Two UltraSPARC III cores with 8 megs of cache and each running at 1.2 GHz each.

Sun has good things going for them but they need to expand into new areas and take another look at the current situation.

Re:Huh, because both are unoptimized?

[drinkypoo]

He just mentioned it in passing. The reason he is comparing these two is not that they are both unoptimized, but that they are both standards. It's well known that Sun's "professional" compiler suite produces some of the best code around for assorted sparc-architecture processors, which makes sense on assorted obvious levels, but their lack of fine optimization on x86 may harm them, and this is (if amazingly vaguely) alluded to here.

Meanwhile Solaris 9 for x86 (aka SunOS 5.9, as the article says - it misses the point that Solaris simply means (in Sun nomenclature) SunOS plus the windowing environment, and it once means SunOS plus openwindows, and that Solaris 1.x is SunOS 4 (BSD-based, mentioned) and Solaris 2.x is SunOS 5 (SVR4--based, which is not mentioned directly that I recall)... Er, where the hell was I? Solaris 9 is not available in a version well-optimized for x86. Because you can only relink the kernel and not recompile it, since source code is not provided, it is doomed to this fate. Redhat 9 is also something of a standard, and it happens to come with (and only support) linux kernel 2.4.20. 2.6 has many optimizations but is new. So he mentioned it because it puts both distributions on somewhat equal footing, and in fact in most benchmarks (which are overly simple, but anyway) the systems came up with similar performance when realistic options were utilized.

PHP on Solaris isn't hard at all

[green pizza]

Ugh, why does everyone assume installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL is so hard on Solaris (or IRIX or AIX for that matter)?

Once you have your GNU environment configured, it's a simple matter of compiling. I haven't run into a snag doing this in over 3 years on three different commerical unices.

Here's a good link for the total newbie:
http://ampubsvc.com/~meljr/AMPS.html

I suppose you could also go to sunfreeware.com (or for IRIX, freeware.sgi.com), but learn to build the stuff yourself and you'll know what's going on, have the latest versions, and have way more flexibility. Isn't this why you're using u*nix anyway? For the flexibility? Don't let the lack of a precompiled ready-to-install package get in your way, you're not stuck in the Windows world anymore.
(end rant)