SUMMARY : comparing solaris 8 to windows 2000

My question was :

Hey Guys,

I want to compare Solaris 8 to windows 2000,
especially from thread management point. But this is a
technical comparison, not like some magazine's
reports.  Could you refer some whitepapers or give me
an idea about it?

We have a Java application which runs on Solaris 7 ,
but windows 2000 runs 10 times faster. We will test it
on Solaris 8, but we have no clue about the reason and
I dont think that Solaris 8 is 10 times faster than 7.

Also, is there a way to compare an intel 900 Mhz PIII
cpu to an ultrasparc-II 400 Mhz ?

Thanks for the replies from :
Don Mies
Dave Foster
John Martinez
Joe Fletcher

According to results in www.specbench.org, sparc cpu's
are not fast even with 1 GB memory. P4 and Alpha cpu's
have much better results. What Don said about missing
functionality was interesting. I did not try to
compare solaris on intel to x86 cpu's because we
prefer to use OS's on their natural architecture. It
can be helpful to do hardware-only comparison.

Don wrote the mail below and sent me some documents
about multithreading :
---
Other than writing a set of benchmarks that do
essentially
exactly what your target application is going to do, I
don't
know how to do this.

However, one thing you need to keep in mind (if it's
applicable)
is that Windows 2000 (or the other variants of it)
often don't
scale well.

We had an application that operates with thousands of
threads
and Windows rolled over and died!  If your application
uses an
unusual amount of any system resource, check it very
carefully
before concluding that Windows is faster/better!

If you are primarily concerned with thread management,
there is
a LOT of functionality missing in Windows 2000.  For
instance,
there is no way for one thread to kill another! 
Windows requires
all threads to terminate before the process does or
you will leak
system resources and eventually need to reboot your
server, etc.
Don
----
Dave Foster wrote :

The only article I know of on this is:

     http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/

but this is Windows NT and not Win2K.

I've seen 140MHz Sparc systems blow a 233MHz Intel
system
out of the water...you can't just go by cpu speed.

As for your java app, I'd look into cache issues, how
you are accessing your data, whether your problem is
cpu
or disk i/o bottleneck, etc..

Dave Foster
---

John Martinez wrote :

What would be interesting is to compare Windows 2000
to Solaris 8 Intel
platform on the same hardware.

You should ask this question on the Solaris on Intel
mailing list as
well. I'm a member along with some really bright folks
and some folks
from Sun that are responsible for Solaris on the Intel
platform. Check
out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisonintel

I don't have any real answers for you, but I run both
types of machines
at work. One is a Sun Ultra10 workstation, 512MB
memory, 440MHz CPU.
It's running Solaris 8 4/01. The other is a Dell
Precision 420M with 
two
P-III's running at 733MHz with 512MB memory as well.
It's running
Solaris 9 Intel Beta (I'm beta testing at work). The
P-III kicks major
butt over the U10! I don't have hard numbers, but it
works great. I'm
sure it helps that the Dell is running 10kRPM Ultra160
SCSI drives as
well, while the U10 has 7200RPM IDE drives in it.

-john
---

And Joe Fletcher :

Look on www.specbench.org for CPU comparisons. The
Ultra-II is 
basically the
slowest mainstream chip on the market and possibly the
weakest java 
engine
around. AFAIK the current speed kings are the Alpha
EV68 1GHz and maybe 
also
the new IBM RS6000 stuff though I think that sort of
cheats by having 
two
processors per chip. A P4 or Athlon is also well up
there.







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