My first company and love was SUN so sue me.
SO I called up a few old friends at SUN, you know we are stress testing our
stuff. SUN is still a big company and they can accomodate a few "roaches" of
software like us... "you guys need to benchmark on real hardware? sure come
on down!" (we have to go down from SF to Menlo Park in the valley) and the
guy goes on "I believe I can free a machine, do you have all the software
you need?" ... "yes, sir!" is my answer..
so we show up at MPK 1 (menlo park 01, one of their benchmark centers) where
e10000 runs under fans, costs $1M each, and air conditioning is king :)))...
if you believe... all the consoles to drives these "optical hard drives" are
LCD with 1800x1600, just to impress customers, ah man , I miss the opulence
of SUN's benchmark centers ...
The guy apologizes "I can't free up fiber optic disks, we are tied up right
now, can you kids do with just one 4gig drive? All I can put on the line is
a 10-way E4500 with 4gig RAM, is that enough for you"... so I gasp... I am
looking at $.5M hardware to run jboss on... "sure" is the answer... what do
you want me to tell the guy? that I want to spin a E10000 and that nothing
else will do? can you spare $2M??? Cray or nothing???
nah.... Sebastien, Daniel (the german dude) and myself are just like kids in
a candy store...
"I only have the October 2000 release of Solaris 8, is that OK?", "<gasp>
yes sir </gasp>"...
The dude does a fresh install for us and a fresh "JDK1.3 Hotspot" install...
So we run the fucking thing... it is a 10way E4500 with 10 UltraSparc II CPU
at 336Mhz and 4Meg of cache *each*, the puppy (called schroeder) carries a
"small" 4gig of RAM but hey that is all they can free up for us, cause it's
a busy day, bummer right? :)))))
... I don't think jboss ever ran on such bare fucking awesome kick ass metal
(or are you guys running RS6000's out there?).
You know what? I just love bare metal! I really do, I am a theorist, yes,
however bare metal is still king in my mind.
Our first test with 10 threads is irrelevant. we directly go to 1000
threads, and then for the first time we see that the scheduler on notify is
dead slow, and I understand it is our notify/notifyAll problem in EEI and
ESI (something we never got to see at home, since our stuff would die
before). So we "vi" the notivyAll stuff on the spot, and then
.....poooooooof! the stuff just runs.... what? it just runs and runs and
runs, goes up to 1000 threads and goes on, not a hiccup, not a pause, just
goes on... and finishes with a 9ms/invocation for a 1000 threads. DONE!
(what do you mean you are done....how can you be done, do it again... same
result)
<tears-in-eyes/>
at 5000 clients, solaris complains that he can open more sockets and my
friend from SUN tells me we would need to tune the OS... "it's ok man, it's
OK really, we can't break this..."
we spawn a 1000 clients with buckloads of beans and iterations and it just
runs.... not a *single* time out (which we did get on Windows2000) and *all*
our invocations run under 9ms.... I need to breathe.... I need to get out,
how can these guys keep so cool? and just look at the stuff and smile?
so the benchmark guy goes " he! not bad kids, your stuff brought the 10 CPUs
to 100% load for 30 seconds, not bad! " I don't know if he is making fun of
us, but he seems earnest in his praise, I am happy we max a big box, hey it
is my baby, but I can't smell burned CPUs like we did at Telkel...
so we left at 7pm and dive in silicon valley traffic jams, very impressed by
SUN equipment... now I remember (even though I am off SUN's heroin) why SUN
hardware is so superior, I mean that even lowly ULTRA-SPARCII 336MHz chips
(sure with 4M cache) run SOOO much better than our little 900Mhz x86, I
guess the recent 88% growth rate of SUN is normal.
Daniel said "you know what really impressed me? that jboss was stable enough
to reach these level and strectch an e4500...." yeah kid me too .... and we
were all quiet, yeah, we were all very proud.
he he...
"I want it in my hands, just spinning round and round"
-- always --
________________
Marc Fleury, PhD
CTO, Telkel Inc.
________________
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