I have an ultra 5 (450 MHz, 1Gb RAM) with Solaris 10 that I use as a
J2EE application server with JBOSS and MySQL. Maybe too much for such a
box, but good enough for testing applications.

Having seen around some benchmark tests on filesystems that were giving
zfs as faster than ufs, and having only a 60Gb hard disk, I thought to
optimize the space by making a ZFS pool and filesystems and possibly
get some more optimized disk access.

So I dumped all my ufs filesystems, reclaimed some space from the hard
disk and created a zfs pool on c0t0d0s7 (not the whole disk, as I still
needed to boot from ufs)

I tried first inlcuding /var in the pool, which would have made more
sense for a ZFS filesystem, but the box refused to boot ending in
single user mode and being unable to mount /var. I guess that might
have been because the zfspool is started after /var is needed.

I gave up having /var in the pool, and I went only for /opt (where
JBoss and MySQL are installed), and /u01 where the database data is
stored.

That finally was successful, but JBoss' startup time increased
dramatically from 1':20" (one minute and 20 seconds) to 1':48". The box
response time at the console also dramatically slowed down: just by
typing a command, I was getting the echo back in several seconds. At
times it looked like the box was hanging, but it wasn't, it was just
very slow.

Waited a few minutes, just to get to a stage when the box was
practically idle after the services startup, but that didn't help. The
response at the console was better, but a connection using ssh was
still sluggish. I repeated this a few times, always getting the same
results.

So I went back to ufs on this box and everything is fine as it was.

I did the same on a Blade 1000, that is, using a disk slice, rather
that a full disk for zfs, but I did not notice any significant
performance degradation, perhaps because the more powerful architecture
just absorbs any additional demand on cpu/IO.

HD

haydude wrote:

> I have an ultra 5 (450 MHz, 1Gb RAM) with Solaris 10 that I use as a
> J2EE application server with JBOSS and MySQL. Maybe too much for such a
> box, but good enough for testing applications.
>
Are you sure it's 450 MHz????? AFAIK, 440 MHz was the fastest CPU
available for the Ultra 5/10 and 400 MHz was the fastest supported in
the Ultra 5.

Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
> haydude wrote:
> Are you sure it's 450 MHz????? AFAIK, 440 MHz was the fastest CPU

Yes it is a 440, though, it does not make any difference to the topic.

"haydude" <haydude@alpensea.com> writes:
> That finally was successful, but JBoss' startup time increased
> dramatically from 1':20" (one minute and 20 seconds) to 1':48". The box
> response time at the console also dramatically slowed down: just by
> typing a command, I was getting the echo back in several seconds. At
> times it looked like the box was hanging, but it wasn't, it was just
> very slow.

What did "svcs -x" say? How about "prstat -aL?" Or "intrstat?" Was
the box actually busy doing something or was it just slow?

> I did the same on a Blade 1000, that is, using a disk slice, rather
> that a full disk for zfs, but I did not notice any significant
> performance degradation, perhaps because the more powerful architecture
> just absorbs any additional demand on cpu/IO.

I've seen equal or lower I/O demands on my systems using ZFS compared
to UFS. Something else may be amiss on this system.

--
James Carlson, KISS Network <james.d.carlson@sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677

> I've seen equal or lower I/O demands on my systems using ZFS compared
> to UFS. Something else may be amiss on this system.
>

Ultra 5's have IDE drives as standard, and there is an issue with ZFS
performance on SPARC systems with IDE. It's CR 6421427; I've been
running test binaries with a fix on my X1 for a couple of weeks and it's
pretty happy. Hopefully it'll be patched soon, this is the second time
somebody's posted about it in the past few days.

Dave

haydude wrote:
>
> That finally was successful, but JBoss' startup time increased
> dramatically from 1':20" (one minute and 20 seconds) to 1':48". The box
> response time at the console also dramatically slowed down: just by
> typing a command, I was getting the echo back in several seconds. At
> times it looked like the box was hanging, but it wasn't, it was just
> very slow.

There's a known issue with Solaris 10 and the IDE controller that is
in those boxes which seems to bite ZFS incredibly badly. I believe
it's being worked on and I sincerely hope there will be a patch in the
fairly near future, because it's really, really annoying :-).

--tim