On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 10:05:37 +0100, Pete Young wrote:

> Dear gurus,
>
> I've recently acquired a couple of near-identical E450s and my
> colleague is determined to run Linux on one of them.
> I hear cries of 'bad idea, Solaris will be faster'. And being
> Solaris biased, I'm inclined to agree.
>
> But why, when, for what kind of use? There's quite a bit of
> conjecture here but very little in the way of fact, at least that I
> can find. We have an opportunity here to do a bake-off under
> reasonably controlled conditions.
>
> The machines are both E450s, 4x400 Mhz, 2x18 Gb disk, 2048 Mb memory.
> I'm expecting one to be Solaris 9 or 10 and the other to be based
> on Gentoo Linux.
>
> What kind of tests would the supporters of both camps like us to
> run, bearing in mind that we don't have pots of money to spend on
> software such as oracle and will be largely limited to publicly available
> software or that which comes with the respective OS's?

If you want databases - do use Oracle. Just download it for free from
their website, by joining OTN. As long as you use it for testing, devel
and such you don't have to pay any licence - you pay only if you use it
commercialy.

Another good test, imho, would be apache, 2.0 threaded. No point in
using a poorly paralelable software on a quad machine. Depending on the
enviroment you might want to try some file sharing performance as well...
A NFS-ish test, perchance ?

Do bear in mind that linux has moved up, and solaris might not prove to
be much faster, if any. These machines are low on ram (by todays standards),
plus you don't have any storage (which would greatly speed up solaris,
while it would remain unsupported on linux...). This is one of the biggest
advantages of solaris - support, and reliability. Not speed.

Regards,
Nikola.