Ken,
We have a V440 (4 x 1.6 GHz US IIIi, 16 GB) and a V890 (4 x 1.5 GHz US
IV+, 16 GB) as our Sun Ray servers in a failover group. We have 80 DTUs
attached, utilisation peaks at about 75% (60 users, typically 20 on V440
and 40 on V490) and we run Firefox, Oracle Developer, Matlab and various
Java IDEs.
The performance difference between the two boxes is simply staggering.
The V440 seems slow even with only 2 or 3 users attached, but V890 seems
quick with 40 (and a load average over 20). The V890 cost three times as
much but I would rather have one V890 than four V440s.
We haven't benchmarked the single-threaded performance of either box but
my perception is that the V890 is at least twice as fast.
Alan Lumsden
University of Sunderland, UK
Ken Mandelberg wrote:
We currently use a V440 as a Sunray server. There is a population of
maybe 50 potential users, but there is rarely more than a dozen logged
in and half that many active. The active ones are running thunderbird
and firefox, and occasionally Matlab and various development tools.
Firefox can easily soak a lot of cycles.
The system is perceived as slow for two reasons. First, there are
times that there are too many users. We can solve that by putting a
second V440 we have in a rotary.
Second, even if you are the only user on the system its simply not as
fast as a modern X86 workstation. As far as I know none of the Sparcs
are really that much faster than the V440 for single threads. Maybe
the Sparc servers with higher cpu counts and cores can handle more
users and give more throughput, but I'm skeptical that single desktop
app's seem much faster than on the V440.
So is there a Sunray server that would give faster desktop
performance? Would an AMD/Intel server give faster Sunray desktops?
Even if it did there are issues because of software support. The Linux
support is disappointing. No NSCMS and rather old enterprise editions
that are not desktop rich. Solaris X86 on the other hand doesn't have
vendor support for Matlab and similar packages.
So its not very clear to me what server hardware would be perceived as
a real upgrade.
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