[SunHELP] Lazy lady....

[velociraptor]

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 13:07:55 -0400, Dale Ghent <daleg at elemental.org> wrote:
> On Sep 1, 2004, at 1:01 PM, Fernando Machado Jr. wrote:
> 
> > I'll try.... ;)
> >
> > we have a software running in our solaris for comparing gene sequences
> > in databases, called blast. We did an analysis here yesterday and it
> > took 20 minutes more than a desktop that we have running linux here.
> 
> Is your comparison software multithreaded, ergo, able to run multiple
> comparisons simultaneously?
> 
> I would say that one new Pentium 4 CPU can outrun a 1Ghz UltraSPARC 3,
> but since you're using a V880 with 4 CPUs, that should definitely run
> your app faster... IF is it multithreaded well.
> 
> The big thing about Suns is not necessarily their CPU speed, but their
> IO capacity.

What have 'sar' or other perf analysis applications told you?
CPU constrained, memory constrained, I/O constrained?  Is
your db on the same box or is it talking across the network?
If the latter, how is the network holding up?

You haven't said anything about your disk setup--if it's memory
constrained and you have swap on a disk that is getting hit by
the reads/writes of the application itself, that could cause your
performance to deteriorate dramatically, for example.

Check your /var/adm/messages, make sure there are no hardware
issues that are cutting into your performance (far-fetched, but you
a quick check).

Is this 'blast' a port from Linux, written natively for Solaris,
or some arcane abomination that is neither (thinking those
evil libraries they use for Windows ports to Solaris <shudder>).
Does it even understand Solaris, much less do SMP? (what 
Dale said).

=Nadine=