[SunRescue] How FAST is a SUN IPC

[Bill Bradford]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2000 at 07:57:34PM -0700, Paul Theodoropoulos wrote:
> What I don't understand is why folks run anything other than 
> Solaris on SPARC hardware? It goes without saying that Solaris is 
> finely tuned to the SPARC architecture. I've been running Solaris 
> for years, and I just don't see the shortcomings in it that people 
> constantly refer to (e.g. "Slowlaris").
> I'm running a national server complex on sun hardware (e4500's, 
> ultra 5/10s, and Netra T1's) running Solaris 7 and 8, and it runs 
> like top. I can sleep nights. It's plenty fast - my backbone news 
> transit server is in the top 200 servers in the world - it's a 
> 'lowly' ultra 5/333.
> I'm not anti-Linux (or xxxBSD for that matter) either. I just don't 
> see the point of linux, at least not on SPARC hardware, when 
> Solaris 8 is "free" and runs like a bloody bat out of hell.

Yeah, the later releases of Solaris run *great* on newer Ultra
hardware (I've got an U10/300 with 384mb RAM, Creator2D, and 
Sol8+MU1 here), but on older stuff like the 1, 1+, 2, IPC,
etc, newer Solaris releases are slow (sol7 was the last to
support sun4c) or wont run at all.  I'd consider 2.5.1 or 2.6
the absolute most I'd run on a sun4c, and then only with 64mb
RAM.

NetBSD on Sun4c, literally, whips solaris' ass in terms of
performance (I've seen what Dave McGuire can squeeze out 
of a a SS5/85 with NetBSD and 32 meg RAM...)

As for sparc/linux.. well.. it exists.. but I wont run it.

Bill

-- 
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| Bill Bradford      |  www.sunhelp.org |
| mrbill at mrbill.net  |   www.decvax.org |
| Austin, Texas USA  |    www.pdp11.org |
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