Comments on: Benchmarking Linux, Solaris and Windows on HP hardware

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:26:37 +0000

Hi Jerry,

All my OS installs were pretty stock – no tuning was carried out. They had minimal package sets, and not too many daemons running.

Geekbench is pretty tailored towards math tests too, so it’s not exactly ‘real world’ – unless you’re building a heavy compute platform.

Still, since shifting numbers around is fundamental to an OS I’d say it’s still a pertinent test.

I’d love to have the time to do much more detailed tests for sure.

By: Jerry

Jerry — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 01:34:53 +0000

I am pretty curious about your results. I did a similar test with a Sun x4600 recently and my results were not at all similar. We use an in house, bench with FFTW, SSL, SHA, SMTP, and large file break and recombine. I am going to reconfigure soon, I am interested in your configuration options. I installed Solaris with SUNWCore network configured and net services minimal. I installed Rhel 5.2 minimal, it takes two cd’s don’t know why, and configured network. I installed windows 2k8 core x64 and configured networking. I made sure to configure each machine as a replica of what we would run in production. I got amazing scaling on Windows up to 8 cores and diminished scaling up to 16 and then very little improvement after. On Linux the results were the best from 1 core to 16 cores, after 16 it didn’t scale as well, after 32 there were diminishing returns. On Solaris we say close performance up to 16 cores. At 16 cores Solaris was under by about 12%, Solaris eclipsed Linux at 22 cores and reigned supreme to 48. Next we installed Oracle on all platforms and the results were similar except the performance lagged on Solaris. Solaris didn’t win the database challenge until 27 or 28 cores. I didn’t get any really wierd result except when I installed Rhel4 with everything the performance was about half of the previously observed performance. It was power management and CPU scaling. I am interested in Geekbench, I just downloaded it and will need to see how close it replicates our results.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:32:43 +0000

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your comments. Is your opening question aimed at myself, or the populous in general? If the former – then I wouldn’t, and I didn’t mean to imply that I would. Quite the opposite. But for many years Solaris has been known as Slowaris for good reason (and I’m playing devils advocate here, my personal preference for server OS these days is always Solaris 10 x86), therefore to find it was the quickest in terms of real numbers was actually a very pleasant surprise.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:50:07 +0000

I’m curious why you would discount Solaris when looking at scalability? It’s the only OS in the list that has been running on huge multi-processor systems for decades so Sun have had quite a while to get it right ;o)

I work for an Enterprise where we do run a bit of everything (right OS for the job and all that), but with the core-count on x86 systems rapidly growing with Nehalem-EX/Magny-Cours, I’m expecting Solaris 10/Next to grow significantly on this platform (especially with the RAS features of EX introducing more SPARC-like capabilities).

By: More on Benchmarking OSs | Probably

More on Benchmarking OSs | Probably — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:29:39 +0000

[...] Mark on Feb.15, 2010, under performance Intrigued by my recent benchmarking exercise I decided to take a look at the various operating systems’ performance on a common [...]