Linux vs. Solaris file IO performance

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 12:11:26 EST
Tom Varga said:

>Does anybody know what settings could be tweaked on a Solaris box so that it
>would do file IO more efficiently like a linux box?  I don't think that this
>is NFS related because we're dealing with local partitions.  I'm trying to
>convince our IT people that we're dealing with an incredible inefficiency with
>file IO on Solaris boxes, but I don't know what to suggest that they do to
>improve the situation.

Well, it would be nice to know the specs of the hardware you're 
comparing.  It's tough to do the Solaris vs. Linux comparisson 
without using similar hardware specs in that comparisson.

If you're Solaris box is one the SBus-based systems, and you're 
comparing that to a recent X86 system, you're comparing a 40Mhz Sbus 
to what's probably a PC-100 or 133Mhz based system.

Also, the IDE drives in a recent PC peak at a much higher rate than 
the older SCSI2 based Sun systems. Though SCSI can sustain higher 
rates as compared to IDE, IDE's peak is a lot higher, and this is 
what you'll probably see in something like an 'rm' or 'tar' 
operation.

The amount of memory and swap in each system also plays a huge part 
in performance, especially for Solaris.

So, tell us the hw specs, and we can probably better help identify 
what your bottleneck is.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!