In comp.sys.sun.hardware Damon Getsman <dgetsman@gmail.com> wrote:
> At this point what I am wondering is whether or not the requirements
> for the server I have described would be better served by an x86
> server, with the same amount of RAM (64-bit, obviously), that won't
> have the power requirements of this piece. I know that the Sparc
> processors support multiple threads per CPU;

Some processors do. The SPARC II modules you have do not.

> I do not know if this
> will give significant improvement over the x86 architecture for the
> applications I have described. The server we are currently using
> supports approximately 40 Calendar and related LDAP requirement
> instances; we expect this need to grow 5-10 times before we commit to
> a new infrastructure.

It almost certainly will not. The E3500 was a very nice machine, but
the 400MHz processors you have are over 10 years old. Almost any
machine today can have the I/O and RAM that the 3500 could, and can
destroy it CPU-wise.

> If, indeed, the x86-64 architecture does seem to be the better
> solution, what kinds of server implementations would I see better
> performance from the sparc with 4 processors on?

I wouldn't say the "architecture" is the better solution, but the
specific server you have is "slow" by today's technology. I would
expect better performance from any modern x86-64 system on almost any
workload, presuming it had suffcient RAM and decent I/O.

--
Darren Dunham ddunham@taos.com
Senior Technical Consultant TAOS http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper? San Francisco, CA bay area
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