> As far as I understand Sun current strategy, Solaris > 10 market tooks in account small [1- or 2-CPU] > servers, too. Solaris 10 seems to be positioned as OS > that covers the areas that Linux covers. So, the > scaling issue is not accepted by me as final > [potential] customer. And telling that uni- and > dual-CPU machines will work slower using Solaris vs > Linux, is... somewhat strange. > One should not pay twice for the fact that his > machine is slow.
Your understanding is entirely correct. With Solaris 10, Sun undertook a very specific set of projects with the explicit objective of improving the performance of small (1-2p) systems. I can't speak for Phil, but in my experience performance engineers have always chosen the solution which scales best, since we have to support 1-128 processors with the same kernel. The implication here, is that although we scale well, the cost for 1-2p may be unexceptably high. Part of the small-systems work that we undertook, and that Bart championed, was to find these cases where we out-scaled Linux but performed worse on small systems or small workloads. In these situations a lot of the engineering work involved figuring out a compromise which allowed us to scale well on large machines, but to eliminate the overhead on small machines. Clearly, there is still work to do, and Linux is a moving target. That said, we are aware of performance issues with pipes and are investigating. If you're interested in taking a look yourself, please feel free. Both pipe and context switch performance are relatively known issues, and we've implemented performance improvements for them in Solaris 10. It's just that they still need more love. There's a forthcoming set of improvements to the VM which is expected to provide performance improvements to all areas of the VM, context switching should be included. Although, someone on the VM team would probably have more details. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ perf-discuss mailing list perf-discuss@opensolaris.org
