Re: Solaris

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Mark Kirkwood wrote:

> scott.marlowe wrote:
>
> >My general experience from a year ago was that Linux was about 2 to 3
> >times faster on older 32 bit sparc hardware than Solaris, and just under 2
> >times as fast on 64 bit hardware.
> >
> Wow - 2 times faster is significant ! It would be interesting to try a
> midrange SMP box ( e.g E280/E480 ).

Keep in mind, this is running Postgresql that measures out at about twice
as fast.  I was testing with things like the 10k row database in the
regression tests, a few of our own 1M row tables, and pgbench with
parallel access up to a good amount (I think about 64 or so)  The boxes
were an Ultra 1, and a Sparc 20.  The Sparc 20 / Linux was running Solaris
and Linux in dual boot, and the linux performance on it was astounding,
Solaris was painfully slow at everything.

On the Ultra 1, the race was much closer, i.e. Linux was about 80% faster
than solaris.  I think we were running whatever the latest production
quality versions of RedHat (6.2, the last Sparc version) and solaris at
the time.

note that we're talking about a year and a half or so ago, so things may
have changed under both OSes.

> >  The issue in the past was mainly that Solaris had a brain damaged
> >sort() call that was very slow when it had a lot of duplicate keys.  That
> >has since been updated by Sun.
> >
> >
> Hmm - I ran into that situation with qsort() and many equal keys (see
> Hackers thread "Solaris Performance"). Sadly Sun have not amended that
> situation at all (in Solaris 8 anyway).

Actually, I thought there was patch out there somewhere.  Anyone else
know?