According to a benchmark, Sun's Niagara processor is over 4 times faster at serving dynamic PHP pages than a dual Xeon server. "We did real production benchmarks using different servers. Servers were put into production behind load-balancers, then weights on load-balancers were changed so we got highest number of dynamic PHP requests per second. It must sustain that number of requests for some time and no drops or request queue were allowed. With static requests numbers for Opteron and T2000 were even better but we are mostly interested in dynamic pages."
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Member since:2005-07-08
Consider that David Miller just got the kernel to boot on a Niagara machine and the blog entry was linked here two days ago I can see why some people woud not take you seriously:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13721
It will probably be at least a year before Linux actually runs on a Niagara machine (a full distro).
Member since:2005-07-07
First to thank you for the second answer you provided.
Consider that David Miller just got the kernel to boot on a Niagara machine and the blog entry was linked here two days ago I can see why some people woud not take you seriously
Why, because I didn't succed to read all the news about Solaris (and to be honest, I always skip articles Linux booted on XXX (where I even skip what XXX is), I can only expect it on my home broom the next day)? I do have days without internet too sometimes and I don't have time to subscribe for all news about every OS I need in the line of my work. And even in the case I would notice that, it is only booting. I asked about yearly timeframe.
But,... damn, if it is so, then I better move off. I don't hide the fact that Solaris became really interesting for me when Sun announced GPL version (CDDL is not interesting to me, I always decide for commercial apporach over free), before that it I was satisfied with commercial approach to Solaris only where Linux was no go.
But to be truthfull. Somehow I find my self more or less depressed whenever or wherever I ask Solaris users about some things. Sorry to say this like that, but mostly I get the feeling that Solaris community is a "piss-poor excuse for group of people zealoting about the same thing".
Actualy you're the only "human" person I encoutered when posting any question about Solaris. As soon as I mention I'm not Solaris die-hard and I what really need is crossing the borders between platforms, trolling and modding down starts. I don't mind being modded down, but it is far different from BSD or Linux communities I'm used to with (all my knowledge there is mostly community based, in Solaris case, well I only learned how to become dissapointed). It comes with a lot of grain and salt with it.
Or to translate it, as much as Sun gained me with their latest actions, communities are turning me back away.
It will probably be at least a year before Linux actually runs on a Niagara machine (a full distro).
This is kind a "just in time" or "just too late" and I don't know if I'm prepared to take the risk. Could you maybe recommend something else for my case? I would appreciate it very much. Or at least some similiar but cheaper SPARC HW with Fiber option (can be older model, since in this case it will run Solaris only), where I could fit p185 and those in my plan (or better say wallet). As I said, when SPARC arch is in question I'm completely new there without a single minute spended on it.
Edited 2006-02-21 21:08
Member since:2006-02-23
As I said. I'm writing CS HPC service.
This implies (to me) that you really care about the performance of a small number of threads. If you have a single-threaded (and single-process) workload, your workload is going to perform very much like you were running on a 2 year old single processor V240. In other words, the T1000 or T2000 would be dog slow. If you are running something that deals with dozens of running threads (32 is optimal) the T2000 will do quite well.
If you are after good performance for a small number of threads, look toward Opteron, Xeon, Power, or UltraSPARC IV+ systems. The first two on that list are likely to be the cost effective options.
FWIW, yes I have used a T2000 (8 cores @ 1 GHz, 16 GB RAM, < $20k list) and it did at least as well as a V490 (UltraSPARC IV @ 1.35 GHz, 32 GB RAM, > $80k list) on a heavily threaded workload (Oracle Apps). The really cool thing is that Oracle charges for 2 CPU's on the T2000 or 6 CPU's on the V490. With Oracle licenses way more than $10k per CPU, the T2000 wins when it comes to licensing as well.
Member since:
2005-07-07
Why on earth would you want to run Linux on an UltraSPARC T1?
??? Now, this is a funny surprise. I really hope you're not the heart of Solaris community. I really don't know why would I deserve being trolled for simple honest question.
As I said. I'm writing CS HPC service. Two of three already ordered installations will run on Linux (Already decided IBM-PPC). One on Solaris (Already decided SPARC).
In the final phase I will have to test complete thing on at least near implementation standard to see if everything is correct. Since I will need to buy at least two machines (but it might scale to four of them) for my test environment you can guess it won't be cheap (and those aren't even thrird of my initial test environment costs).
Now I hope you see my problem.
:: If I buy p185 setup I end up without any option to test Solaris. (or at least I think it is so).
--- Positive thing: I get linux on the almost exact environment, and I could probably make Solaris env. on few Opteron boxes, but as I said I don't really know much about diff between Opteron and SPARC, so I would like to mimick original environment as much as possible to avoid surprises.
--- Bad thing: I don't know how everything will work on SPARC at the end
:: If I buy T1000 setup and Linux doesn't work (or at least it won't start working in one year) I can only say goodbye to another >$12000 which would really badly broke my plans. But let's say Linux would start to work
--- Positive thing: I got similiar hardware for both environments and I can do my final PPC testings on my G5 (or simply add one more, hell they are cheap). Meaning, I got both environments. Better HW, almost the same price. Much better
--- Bad thing: I don't see one
Since I don't have much experience with Sun hardware (for now I've been trying Solaris on Opterons, but as I said Opterons are not in question here), well... I posed this honest question. But, seeing the result of my question, I think going with the p185 (and buy few old SPARC models afterwards) where at least I know the HW setups and community does not make stupid jokes of honest questions would be better.
Sinecerelly, thanks for your time, you really gave me the answer I needed.