There’s a benchmark comparing Solaris to Red Hat at Sun’s web site. Solaris 10 features a new TCP/IP stack architecture, project FireEngine. Sunay Tripathi posted some performance data on his blog as well that people might be interested in. He will also be posting details about the new architecture and how it allows Solaris 10 to perform exceptionally well on 1-2 CPU and also scale linearly across large number of CPUs. With the low end x86 platform moving soon to 8 CPU (and AMD’s dual core, 8 CPU), scaling is something that can’t be ignored anymore.
Solaris Performance Benchmarks
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hi,
Dude, think about what you’re writing…
Are you suggesting that 32-bit Intel 1-way chips are the future? I don’t think so. Besides, I don’t think x86 is exactly what Sun is gunning for here – I mean, c’mon, they’re toys *grin*. Opteron, for now, seems to be the way of the future – and Sun has always gone for the mid to high-end 64-bit SMP stuff.
So for Sun’s target marke, this *is* the standard sort of h/w config.
Also, in regards to your second commnet, as MC already metnioend, there’s just as much chance of Novell or IBM screwing over Linux. With the amount of time, resources, personnel and r&d SUn have pumped in, I seriously doubt they’d just drop it just like that.
bye,
victor
@David
“Why are you comparing GCC with a commercial compiler?
Because GCC is good enough. Many people actually use GCC on Solaris because all the decent software is designed to be built for it.”
Wow David, you get better and better. Kawai’s comment
was in response to a specious post comparing how much Solaris
software cost compared to what came with Redhat for free.
Thanks for confirming that GCC is just as available for
Solaris as it is for Redhat.
If you reply, try to:
Have a point.
Use only as many words as are necessary.
Use facts instead of nebulous conjecture.
Thanks.
@AC
I don’t need to respond. See MJ’s post above. What are you
smoking? seriously.
“Dude”, you don’t seem to have good reading comprehension skills; let’s try again.
<<<Are you suggesting that 32-bit Intel 1-way chips are the future?>>>
No, I’m suggesting Linux support for such a rare setup is immature and will improve rapidly. GCC has well-known problems optimizing for AMD 64 right now, but this will _certainly_ change.
<<<Also, in regards to your second commnet, as MC already metnioend, there’s just as much chance of Novell or IBM screwing over Linux.>>>
You just don’t get it – Novell, IBM, Red Hat, SuSE _can’t_ screw people over using Linux the way Sun _can_ screw over people using Solaris or Java.
<<<With the amount of time, resources, personnel and r&d SUn have pumped in, I seriously doubt they’d just drop it just like that.>>>
What you “doubt” doesn’t matter. In the past, Sun _has_ put lots of time, “resources, personnel and r&d” into Solaris x86, and _has_ dropped it “just like that” when it started to bite their bottom line too hard.
Thanks for confirming that GCC is just as available for Solaris as it is for Redhat.
So what’s the point of paying large amounts of money for Sun’s? Thanks – you’ve just confirmed that Sun’s commercial compilers are pretty worthless.
Have a point.
Use only as many words as are necessary.
Use facts instead of nebulous conjecture.
Well, that’s assuming that you understand what a point is – and those above have sailed high over your head (or you just don’t want to read it:)). If you are a Sun employee you’ve just confirmed to me what Sun’s strategy is, and that it is indeed going to fail pretty miserably
.
Hey Guys,
Does arguing and snapping at eachother help in any way. I can see we all are passion about what we run. As for me, I see benefits in both Solaris and Linux. I can’t single one out, because they both mean something different when it comes to corporate strategies.
To all the people believing Sun is going to screw people over by possibly dropping the x86 support. I would say look at todays market. Look at Sun within the past few years, when they had to let go all of people. I’m sorry but for a company to lose a lot of money and dismiss a lot of employees, just to play a game is silly.
Sun and Linux are 2 good OS’es that scale very well in different ways also different areas of computing. As to say which one is better is beyond me. However since Sun is using Linux and gnome desktop interface as part of there product offering, they are helping push linux. I can see a problem if Sun is just doing it to grow there customer base, and then drop it. However doing this is unwise for their company.
has sun published specweb results for solaris 10 ? see http://www.specbench.org/web99/results. i didnt find that in the results for 2004 or 2003 – specweb99 is a independent authority and it would be interesting to see results from over there.
And much slower than sendmail.
“So what’s the point of paying large amounts of money for Sun’s? Thanks – you’ve just confirmed that Sun’s commercial compilers are pretty worthless. ”
How have I confirmed that Sun’s compilers are worthless?. If
gcc is good enough for you then you can get it and use it on
Solaris just as easily as you can for linux. Thats a point.
The original poster was trying to create some allegory that
Redhat has a free compiler whereas you have to buy one on
Solaris. This, as you helped point out, is not true.
“Well, that’s assuming that you understand what a point is – and those above have sailed high over your head (or you just don’t want to read it:)). If you are a Sun employee you’ve just confirmed to me what Sun’s strategy is, and that it is indeed going to fail pretty miserably
.”
Hmm. OK. I was referring to your blah, blah post:
“The question is, unless Solaris is an absolute country mile ahead of Linux down the road in terms of performance, are people actually bothered by silly bar graphs”
This is not a point. It has no substantiation. I think if
performance is important to you then of course you will be
interested. Whats interesting is that linux advocates have
been doing the ‘slowaris’ thing for a while. Now this is
not a differentiator suddenly performance shouldn’t matter?
“No one abandons a platform over a bar graph and no one switches twice. Given that Solaris 10 isn’t even released this ISP must have been paid to do a test deployment of Solaris 10. It doesn’t say how many messages per second (whatever the hell that is) the Linux servers were doing.”
Solaris 10 is not released. It’s not even in beta. However,
a lot of customer were vey keen to use it and we believe
we have approximately 500,000 installations in customer
sites at the moment. The Solaris express program has been
a great success. So, yes a lot of customers are piloting
on s10 and no they are not being paid. Where did you get
the information that they were being paid or did you
perhaps just make it up?
“Well, the Red Hat pricing page is far easier to understand and they know who they’re selling to”
This is a good point and one I totally agree with.
“Having looked at Sun’s prices in more detail than I have done before, I can definitely say that Sun is most certainly not cheaper than Red Hat in the comparisons they’re making.”
You can’t say you didn’t understand the pricing then go
on and say they they are more expensive. I agree that
sunstore is far from clear. Solaris x86 licensing fees,
same as performance, are no longer differentiators between
making a decision between Redhat and Solaris. In the
majority of cases in the corporate/enterprise sector support
is. Do you think Redhat’s OS support has the coverage and
breadth of knowledge that Suns does? You can get x86
hardware + Solaris x86 + Support from Sun as package
(probably where the pricing on the site comes from) which
brings down the tco considerably. These things do matter.
“Sun need to work out what their target market is and what those customers expect. Sun are going to try and keep their large-scale enterprise deployments price tags whilst giving the appearance of being cheap with basic x86 servers that will be treated like they’ve fallen of the back of a lorry by the Sun sales and support staff (even the Solaris based ones). They did this with Cobalt and they’re going to fail again.”
This is what I termed ‘nebulous conjecture’. I think it
describes pretty well what you have written.
Now, I am not defending the web article. I feel it was
poor and could have been done a lot better. Sunay does
actually explain some of this on his blog (I posted a link
earlier). This was an opportunity for Sun to disseminate
some real information which has been missed. Thats a
shame.
What the Linux /. zealots don’t get is Corporations didn’t start flocking to Linux because it’s this incredible OS that no other OS can match (it’s recent addition of kernel threads is hacked on as is it’s SMP unlike Solaris which had it designed in from day one). They chose Linux because at the time they needed an OS that would run on cheap x86 hardware.
So they had a choice of: Windows 2000, Windows NT, SCO, and Linux. So they chose Linux which being a UNIX was attractive. They chose Red Hat Linux in the USA and SUSE or Red Hat globally as that’s the most popular commercial distro’s and Corporations NEED supported software and hardware.
Forward to 2004 and Sun now sells AMD hardware with a hoice of SUSE Linux or the superior Solaris. Why is it so hard to believe that an OS like Solaris, an OS that’s been around longer than Linux, which has had top paid kernel developers working on it for longer than a decade?
It’s like comparing a hot rod (Linux) to a Ferrari (Solaris). Both are great cars but even High Schoolers with hot rods (I was once one) aren’t so blind to think that they have a Ferrari on their hands.
Unlike RedHat which can’t support it’s current customers with it small staff of 700, Sun can and has been supporting the enterprise for years BOTH hardware and software. RedHat doesn’t write it’s OS so even support Linux isn’t easy for them. Support for the hardware comes from another vendor.
From an OS point of view I’d love to hear why anyone would chose RedHat Linux over Solaris 10 in an Enterprise environment given the same choice of hardware. Note, you have to pay support for both OS’s anyway so cost is NOT the issue. And tell me with a straight face that Linux is more reliable and scaleable than Solaris.
Linux has always been aimed at the 1 CPU desktop user and Linux has repeatedly kept his focus there. Even with SMP he’s more interested in 2-4 cpu’s that are more common. Contrast that with Solaris where customers want 4-96 cpu’s.
You’re going to sacrifice single cpu performance when you try to scale this high which is overhead Linux doesn’t have.
Bryan
P.S. Sun just rolled out JDS on Linux in their entire company, so much for Sun hate Linux.