[rescue] best OS for SPARCserver 10

[Mike F]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 10:41:45 -0400
Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

> On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 03:06 AM, Kay wrote:
> > why NOT solaris8 or 9?
> 
>    Too slow and fat for that hardware.  At least when compared with a 
> BSD variant.

I think it depends on what you're doing with the machine. My only 2 Sun
machines, a SS10 with an SM30 processor (!) and a SS20 with one SM51,
both run Solaris 9. Oh, and both machines each have only 64MB of RAM :)

The SS10 is an IPFilter firewall doing PPPoE for my DSL connection. I have run both NetBSD and OpenBSD on this machine as well, and I found that disk I/O was terrible with both OS's, and interactive (SSH) use was no "snappier" than Solaris. Actually, networking seemed to be
worse with the BSDs as well - I didn't do any formal benchmarking,
but under Solaris this machine can send and receive over FTP at about
the practical max for 10BaseT, while under the BSDs I couldn't get
anywhere near that.

The SS20 does backup duty for my network, as well as serving SMTP/POP3
and as a Samba PDC, and the same caveats applied to this machine -
after running the same services on the BSDs I ended up going back
to Solaris because it performed better.
 
[snip] 
>    I'm sure it's wonderful.  It's just that it'd be twice as fast 
> running a BSD.

See above - I have tried all 3 on the same hardware, and Solaris
consistently seems to perform better.
 
>    Don't get me wrong, I'm a BIG Solaris fan now (and anyone who's
>    known 
> me for a few years knows what a big deal it is for me to say 
> that!)...but on 4c and 4m hardware, a BSD can't be beat.

I'm a big fan of both Solaris and the BSDs ( I wouldn't let Linux touch
my Sun machines) but in my limited (compared to Dave) experience with
Sun hardware and Solaris, Solaris seems to perform better, even on my
dreadfully puny hardware.

As a side note, both of these machines do have the installed software pared down, and ALL unused services/daemons turned off, which can be
a tedious task to do, but once this is done, Solaris is both small
and fast - my firewall installation only uses 170MB of disk space :)

- Mike