Gentoo vs. Solaris Performance?

[antw]

Hiyas,

I'm a sysadmin for a site currently running Solaris, AIX and just beginning to look into Linux. I'm interested if anyone has compared the performance of Linux (specifically gentoo) on Sun hardware compared to Solaris 9 or 10. If no-one has any information I'll be running some tests on three systems anyway. I'm mostly interested in the performance of dedicated servers such as a system acting as a database, web or mail server. I'm also interested in the performance running BEA weblogic. Advice on fair performance tests are also welcome.

The reason we're looking into Gentoo is as an option to have a single method of updating all our platforms and consolidating OS sysadmin know-how and tools. We'll also be testing the PowerPC on some IBM servers at a later date, so tools that also work on PPC would be useful.

The systems I'm interested in testing on are the following:

System 1 (Last generation)
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u 8-slot Sun Enterprise 4000/5000
System clock frequency: 84 MHz
Memory size: 12288Mb
CPU: 12 x 336MHz

System 2 (Current generation Small)
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u Sun Fire 880
System clock frequency: 150 MHz
Memory size: 16384 Megabytes
CPU: 4 x 750MHz

System 3 (Current generation Large)
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u Sun Fire 6800
System clock frequency: 150 MHz
Memory size: 81920 Megabytes
CPU: 20 x 900MHz

I'm mostly interested in the SMP scalability of Linux vs. Solaris, a few of the other admins here are of the opinion that Linux doesn't scale that well. I'd like to test it before I come to any conclusions. I'm using a 6800 system for the scalability tests since its simple to increase or decrease the system size by increments of 4 CPU's.

Thanks for any information or advice.
_________________
/Anthony Whitehead
Unix Sysadmin
PGP Key: http://www.solace.mh.se/~ant/ant.pubkey
1024D/1963012A 49C3 A871 43A8 B912 12D2 046E 8FCC 6062 1963 012A
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[GenTimJS]

I think unfortunately, very few of us on here have access to simmilar grade equipment..

On uniproc systems linux tends to be a bit snappier a bit of the time, but for SMP work I dont think many of us can vouch for performance on sparc. You may consider a post in the "gentoo alternate arcs" asking about non-x86 SMP performance in general.
_________________
-Tim Smith

[antw]

Pity, oh well. I'll post my results in this thread as soon as I have something interesting. Anyone see any problems running on USIII?

During the tests I could probably arrange for a short period of ssh access for gentoo sparc developers if they think it might be useful. This would be at the end of my tests, and of course the systems would be wiped afterwards.
_________________
/Anthony Whitehead
Unix Sysadmin
PGP Key: http://www.solace.mh.se/~ant/ant.pubkey
1024D/1963012A 49C3 A871 43A8 B912 12D2 046E 8FCC 6062 1963 012A
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[GenTimJS]

USIII is officially unsupported, however there are reports of successful installs on USIII based blade 1000's .... On mine however, I get the notorious fast data access MMU miss when trying to boot the install CD... It may depend which kernel you are using.

As I understand it, there are a few less-than-ideally-documented features in the USIII, but im not entirely sure what (if anything) got busticated in the process...

You may be able to get better compatibility, but slower performance, using conservative compile flags and doing a cross-compile build for sparc32 or whatnot .. just a thought, since sun brags about "100% binary compatiblity" with old software on new hardware .... what a support call THAT would be
_________________
-Tim Smith