[rescue] Solaris vs sparclinux

[Carl R. Friend]

    On Fri, 12 Jun 2015, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

> The best performance I found for Solaris, was lots of memory being used for
> processes, some disk access and some swapping going on.  Linux would
> basically grind to a halt on the same hardware, Solaris would not, even on
> a dual 300Mhz or 400Mhz E250.  And that was a real-world example of stuff
> going on.  Nowadays with RAM being so cheap, it is less of a use-case than
> before.

    Where I used to work, this is why I pretty much specified Solaris
for most things where Management (Dilbert-style capitalisation there)
was always gaga over the latest in "New! Shiny!" Linux stuff.  In most
situations, and in the short term, Solaris and Linux were roughly
comparable.  Where Solaris came into its own, however, was late in
the life-cycle where the short-sightedness of Management (which did
*everything* on the cheap and routinely under-spec'ed the iron and
the load on the Solaris boxes (which got more and more work shoved
at them) degraded very gracefully where a similar Linux system would
simply stop doing useful work.

    The above became very useful once we started deploying Solaris
zones where, again, the systems would slow down, but they'd still
be doing useful work where a similar Linux system would be useless.

    The genius in "Industrial Grade" programs, and that includes
operating systems, is that they do a better job at remaining useful
when things get off-normal, either through neglect, bad planning,
or overt hardware failure.  Consumer-grade things still do not
compare, and Linux -- although it's slowly improving -- is still
very much in that category, if they can keep the thing from getting
too bloated, Windwoes-style.

    Cheers!

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
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