Benchmarks For Linux And Solaris On SPARC Hardware?

NetJunkie asks: "We currently run several Web servers on Sun Ultra 5 workstations. We're interested in moving to Linux since there are some things we want to do which are expensive to do with Solaris. Are there any good benchmarks of Linux on Sparc against Solaris? We're rolling out PC hardware now, but we'd like to keep using our existing Sun boxes and good benchmarks will make this a much easier sell."

Sparc

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I have no experience running Linux on Sparc, but, in my opinion, from a electronics standpoint, the Sparc has it all! Most awesome design I have seen in computer equipment. We have a couple Ultra Sparc 30's in use as controllers for big 65 ppm printers and they are rock solid. They NEVER go down. Why look at Linux? You obviously have the money for the solaris license. Keep running solaris if they are doing a good job. If they ain't, I doubt putting Linux on them will change anything. I can understand the advantage you'd get by using Linux, but if the Solaris stuff works, great! If you don't like the Solaris web server (I think they sell Netscape's server?? I dunno.) Apache should run on Solaris.

Windows 2000

[djmoocow]

Windows 2000 is a nice OS but it has way too much overhead...and yes running solaris can be expense ...but i dont see why Linux would not run just as well as Solaris on a sparc machine ...and by far the Ultra Sparc Series Outperforms any of the compition....

With Ultra 5's it's not an issue.

[bbk]

The Ultra 5 system architecture is basically the same as a PC - the UltraSparc IIi that's running the machine has a PCI bus interface built in (for PC folks, think of it as an integrated northbridge - and reminiscent of alpha 21064 series of chips)

Bandwidth wise, these machines are no better than a cheapo PC - their internal bus structure is nearly identical, as are most of the peripherals they use. As far as benchmarks go, check out:

http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html#q_1_27

For the most part, Linux on sparc will be around the same speed as Solaris on sparc, with variation
one way or the other on certain benchmarks due to OS design differences. I'd prefer Linux anyway - it uses a lot less disk space and memory to do the same things as solaris can.

That said, I'm beginning to wonder how viable Sun will be in the future. Their newest processor, the UltraSparc III, at 600 Mhz is slower in both integer and floating point than a P3 800 (according to the spec2000 benchmark, www.specbench.org). Yeah, its more efficent per clock cycle, but when you realize that the cheapest workstation with a single USIII 600 in it costs 10k, and you can easily build a Dual P3 800 system for under 2k, you soon realize that for sheer processing power, Sun is up a creek without a paddle.

BBK

We have a good reason.

[NetJunkie]

We need to do some things with a *LOT* of very small files. UFS doesn't handle this well and the only option we've found is to buy a copy of Veritas File System for every Ultra 5 box....which is $3K/license.

I can do everything we want with Linux and ReiserFS for much less money.

Saw those.

[NetJunkie]

I saw those benchmarks at the UltraLinux site but they are very old, and was curious if anyone had done some new ones.

I agree completely with the hardware. We can do so much more with a PC based server than with a Sun box. We aren't exactly using E10Ks here.

Re:We have a good reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

"can do everything we want with Linux and ReiserFS"
uh, no you can't. Since when does reiserfs support anything other than x86?

Sun boxen vs. PCs

[Christopher Thomas]

That said, I'm beginning to wonder how viable Sun will be in the future. Their newest processor, the UltraSparc III, at 600 Mhz is slower in both integer and floating point than a P3 800 (according to the spec2000 benchmark, www.specbench.org). Yeah, its more efficent per clock cycle, but when you realize that the cheapest workstation with a single USIII 600 in it costs 10k, and you can easily build a Dual P3 800 system for under 2k, you soon realize that for sheer processing power, Sun is up a creek without a paddle.

Where Sun wins against PCs is in the high end. Sun's chips and systems are designed to be very scalable; you'd have a lot of trouble building an x86-based SMP machine that worked as well with a thousand processors as a Starfire.

That having been said, Sun seems to be losing the price/performance war against the other makers of Big Iron. However, x86 is no threat (for the time being).

All of this applies to machines that must have good internal communications bandwidth. If communications bandwidth isn't an issue, then a cluster of cheap PCs with expensive network hardware will always win. YMMV.

Re:We have a good reason.

[NetJunkie]

Hey, you're right. Damn.

Reliability and Your Admin

[fliplap]

Reliability is probably one of the biggest reasons big business chooses Sun over x86. Notice I said big business, for a small business where an hour of downtime isn't going to cost anything then go ahead and use x86. But for big business where an hour can cost $100,000 and up then they probably want a machine and OS that can be upgraded and parts switched out without ever powering down. IIRC with large, multiprocessor Sun machines you can open them up and start yanking processors and the thing will keep on going until that last processor is pulled. Now on the matter of Solaris vs Linux. I've seen people point out speed as an issue. I think you are confused, Solaris _flys_ on Sparc, it doesn't do quite so well on Intel hardware. This also depends a lot on your admin, i know a few who absolutely hate Solaris and won't work with anything but BSD, and of course, vice-versa. Also, have your considered FreeBSD at all, it may offer advantages that you havn't looked at. FreeBSD can also run Linux and Solaris binaries if that helps at all.

Re:Reliability and Your Admin

[gillham]

Also, have your considered FreeBSD at all, it may offer advantages that you havn't looked at. FreeBSD can also run Linux and Solaris binaries if that helps at all.

FreeBSD doesn't have a sparc port yet. (in progress though) Perhaps you're thinking of NetBSD/sparc64 [netbsd.org] instead. Note that this is still a work in progress. Regardless, with the "soft dependencies" support under NetBSD, the small files issue is resolved, without needing to run the filesystem in async mode.

Have you considered the "cachefs" support in Solaris? I'm not really familiar with it, but I've seen references to using it for something like this.

Ultra 5 are a bad reference

[Vandenzob]

Not only does it use IDE where it shouldn't but the floating point performances of the UltraSPARC-IIi are pretty poor. (Used in Ultra 5 and 10) I guess the real fun of running Linux on a Sparc is when dealing with a multi processor machine and comparing the threading and all. But Slowlaris isn't so bad, it actually pretty usefull to learn... It brings BIG MONEY in the bank account, money with which one can buy Alphas to run Linux on.

Tune your UFS settings

[TBone]

There's no readon to have bad performance with small files. UFS is not set up to, by default, perform well with lots of small files, it compromises between large and small files. Jump your Inode count up a whole crapload (maybe 1 Inode per 4k), and install DiskSuite to raid across multiple disks (not multiple partitions, physically separate disks) with a small (4k) stripe size.

Re:With Ultra 5's it's not an issue.

[Omega996]

raw processing power is cool and all, but when it's backed up by a puny 400 MByte/second memory bus and a single PCI bus that can be saturated with a decent 100Mbit NIC and two U2W or SSA controllers running a lot of i/o, what good's it going to do you?

UNIX servers aren't all about processing power...

Re:We have a good reason.

[Omega996]

reiserfs runs on alpha as well as ia32 - sparc and others on their way soon...