Linux vs. Solaris file IO performance

[Tom Varga]

Paul,

    I made the comparisons on an 8-way Sun-Fire-880 with 900Mhz processors
against my 700 Mhz IBM a20 linux laptop.  I'm fairly sure that the differences
that I'm seeing have nothing to do with hardware.  We're talking 40 seconds on
the solaris box vs. 1/10 second on linux.

    From my observations, the main difference is that Linux will complete the
operation, be it rm or tar without any disk IO at all.  It seems to me that
it's doing this to file cache without immediately flushing the changes to disk.
The solaris box, on the other hand, immediately flushes to disk each and every
change.  I can hear the disk kerchunking like crazy.

    So, what I'd like to know is if the Solaris OS has a switch or
configuration that enables it to behave like Linux WRT file IO.

-Tom

> 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!
> 
> 
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