[geeks] Dual Core Rules: your bugs will run twice as fast

Tue Feb 13 15:03:38 CST 2007

On 2/13/07, Phil Stracchino <phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > I will say though, that I could use 64-bit Linux if I had to, while I found
> > 64-bit Windows impossible to live with.
>
> That's an interesting comment.  Would you care to expand upon it?

I found the same with 64 bit windows, support just suck, half of 3rd
party software cant run at all, driver support is not that great. 64
bit linux suck a bit less but is still not ready for primetime.
Solaris is the only really transparent 64 bit solution on x86/x64.
Everything just run, you have plugins for firefox that work etc. You
can just run the kernel at 64 bit and everything else 32 bit, no
emulation or anything like that, mix and match. And really, that's not
surprising, Sun has just been doing this for a lot longer than the
rest.

I'm running Solaris Express and been running that or Solaris 10 since
the summer on that dev box:
psrinfo -pv
The physical processor has 2 cores and 4 virtual processors (0-3)
  The core has 2 virtual processors (0 2)
  The core has 2 virtual processors (1 3)
    x86 (GenuineIntel family 15 model 6 step 4 clock 2993 MHz)
      Intel(r) Xeon(tm) CPU 3.00GHz

And I still have another socket I can fill if I need more cpu cycles.
Granted, this model of 64 bit Xeon is not the fastest, but, I need
more ram than cpu at this point.

Speaking of firefox/thunderbird, top reports (up to the first line
with cpu at 0%):

load averages:  0.16,  0.12,  0.09                                     15:38:33
110 processes: 108 sleeping, 1 stopped, 1 on cpu
CPU states: 97.6% idle,  1.2% user,  1.2% kernel,  0.0% iowait,  0.0% swap
Memory: 2046M real, 299M free, 1247M swap in use, 3755M swap free

   PID USERNAME LWP PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    TIME    CPU COMMAND
 19192 fdion      9  49    0  232M  121M sleep    4:03  1.04% firefox-bin
 17997 fdion      1  59    0  123M  102M sleep    2:52  0.39% Xorg
 19496 fdion      6  49    0   93M   37M sleep    0:04  0.29% thunderbird-bin
 19471 fdion     22  59    0   90M   75M sleep    0:19  0.12% java
 18716 fdion      2  59    0   62M   17M sleep    0:07  0.11% gnome-terminal
 18743 fdion     19  59    0  340M  122M sleep    1:34  0.07% java
 19500 fdion      1  59    0 1880K 1388K cpu/1    0:00  0.05% top
 15882 fdion      1  59    0    0K    0K sleep   11:00  0.05% webservd
 15883 fdion     47  59    0    0K    0K sleep    8:29  0.04% webservd
 18189 fdion      1  59    0  111M   13M sleep    0:30  0.04% mixer_applet2
 18187 fdion      1  59    0  168M   14M sleep    0:12  0.03% wnck-applet
 18163 fdion      1  59    0   48M   12M sleep    0:11  0.02% metacity
 18278 fdion      1  59    0 8744K 5740K sleep    0:02  0.01% xscreensaver
 18166 fdion      1  59    0  170M   18M sleep    0:05  0.01% gnome-panel
 18199 fdion      2  49    0   61M   15M sleep    0:05  0.00% gnome-terminal

I have 2 screens on a single nvidia card (explains the xorg cpu), with
email (thunderbird and evolution) on one screen, along with Oracle sql
developer, xterm, helpdesk monitor and on other screen i have a few
xterms, sun studio 12 (express), a few firefox, evince looking at a
48MB pdf, and finally in the background I have Sun Web server 7, Sun
app server 9, 3 ZFS pools with about 10 zfs filesystems.

On top of that, top uses more cpu than prstat. Here is another shot
with prstat this time:

   PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
 19192 fdion     232M  121M sleep   44    0   0:05:22 1.9% firefox-bin/9
 19496 fdion      95M   39M sleep   59    0   0:00:07 1.0% thunderbird-bin/4
 17997 fdion     128M  108M sleep   59    0   0:03:09 0.6% Xorg/1
 18187 fdion     168M   14M sleep   59    0   0:00:13 0.2% wnck-applet/1
 18163 fdion      48M   12M sleep   59    0   0:00:12 0.1% metacity/1
 19471 fdion      90M   75M sleep   59    0   0:00:25 0.1% java/22
 18743 fdion     346M  122M sleep   59    0   0:01:38 0.1% java/19
 18716 fdion      65M   18M sleep   49    0   0:00:08 0.1% gnome-terminal/2
 15882 fdion      50M 5568K sleep   59    0   0:11:03 0.1% webservd/1
 15883 fdion     235M   52M sleep   59    0   0:08:31 0.0% webservd/47