Comments on: Solaris vs. Linux Performance

By: dE

dE — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 15:52:21 +0000

RHEL, centOS etc.. etc.. etc… are bullshit.

Get some real Linux distos like Gentoo and Debian.

By: Munendra

Munendra — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:10:16 +0000

As per my experience solaris is very good on SUN but not on others , package manager of opensolaris working so slow as compare to Linux.

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 12:26:57 +0000

James,

Excellent commentary

Appreciate your post.

By: James Cornell

James Cornell — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 05:15:14 +0000

On multi-core and multi-socket machines, Solaris will always have the upper hand. Sun has put tons of effort into their LWP threading model. (M:N I believe) Since Sun through the 90′s was mainly a high performance hardware provider in addition to a UNIX vendor, their commercial compilers which are now free to use are more optimized, especially on Opteron and SPARC processors. The threading has been tested all the way up to 100 cpus on a single machine, while glibc and the Linux kernel, are not very efficient on large cpu installations in comparison. It boils down to the fact Sun focuses on high performance computing, while the main function of the Linux kernel is to fit general needs and have support for everything. From personal experience, a Solaris 10 06/06 system even on a uniprocessor Pentium 4 could serve out Apache requests faster, as Solaris does have a new network stack. The NFS implementation is more rich, and Solaris 11/06 has TrustedSolaris extensions which add manditory access control and secure network profiles which save you time from disabling services and what not. A lot of people might be content with Linux, but if you doubt what I’m saying, try it on a Pentium 4, Core Duo, AMD64, or SPARC system, then try alternates, it does the job pretty well, and in some areas does both performance and functionality better, such as Java performance and full NFSv4 with ACLs. NFS throughput in Solaris 9 could not compare to Linux, now it does, and UFS seems to have the same performance as any common file system you would use on Linux or a modern UNIX varient, such as SGI XFS, jfs, ffs2 (UFS2/BSD FFS) or ext3.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 11:19:12 +0000

I believe there are so many aspects that can be tested that just testing for these things wouldn’t have been accurate enough to say Solaris is better than Linux. One of the comments stated that the benchmarks were more CPU and compiler intensive than testing the actual performance of the OS such as network transfer rates and harddrive speeds, etc. I don’t believe that this would show anything “useful” as there are just too many millions of lines of code to consider one better than the other.

My two cents ;)

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 18:27:31 +0000

Jeff,

I must agree with you. Another thing is kernel is not optimized.

Appreciate your post.

By: Jeff Schroeder

Jeff Schroeder — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 06:05:16 +0000

Fedora uses a Mandatory Access Control system by default called SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux). Solaris has the Trusted Extensions (for mandatory access control) and does not enable they by default. The SELinux overhead is roughly 5-8% depending on the system role.

Running these benchmarks again with SELinux disabled would be more interesting.