On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 10:32:32AM -0400, Dossy wrote: > Comparing Solaris on SPARC to either Win32 or Linux on x86 isn't really > a fair comparison since the architectures are quite different -- a > low-end Linux box may well outperform a low-end SPARC box (think: > Celeron vs. Ultra2, etc.) but the clock speeds of the CPUs are way > different: a 900 MHz Celeron can be had for pennies while a 450 MHz CPU > for an Ultra2 is considered fast. A cheap Ultra1 will likely have a
Practically speaking, I can't imagine why anyone would actually care about those distinctions. The fact of the matter seems to be that for almost everybody, for a given amount of money, x86 hardware is going to give you a whole lot more performance than Sparc hardware. (And that using Solaris rather than Linux doesn't provide any performance advantages, either.) Now, if there are any major exceptions to that, that would be interesting. (At a guess, I rather doubt it, at least when it comes to running AOLserver.) And even then, the only people this would REALLY matter to are folks running large websites with many multiple front-end web server machines. Folks like AOL, in other words. Don't your operations people know? FWIW, several years back, the Bitkeeper guys happened to do some limited apples-to-apples Solaris vs. Linux performance comparisons: Solaris x86 and Linux on identical x86 hardware, and Solaris and Linux on identical Sparc hardware. They cautioned that this was NOT in any way a representative benchmark, is was just some informal tests of how some of their Bitkeeper code performed, but their results were interesting: Linux had a 5x speed advantage over Solaris. At the time, McVoy (formerly a Solaris kernel hacker himself) attributed this as likely due to Solaris locking overhead. All that really proved, of course, was that (at least back then), Solaris CAN be dramatically slower than Linux, under some conditions. And by extension, that operating system, surprisingly to many, CAN sometimes impose very noticeable performance differences. Btw, if Sun really does follow through and open-source Solaris like they've said they will, it should be interesting to see what sort of cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques may go on between the Solaris and Linux worlds. -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com/ -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
