Solaris 8-Solaris 9 comparision

[Quanah Gibson-Mount <quanah@stanford.edu>]

Since Igor assured me of the stability in Solaris 9 these days, I went 
ahead and put together a comparison test, since I've been meaning to retry 
Solaris 9 for some time anyhow.

Test: Have 30 systems pound a box running the particular OS.

Hardware: Netra T1405, 3 CPU, 3 GB of RAM, 2 SCSI Disks

The Solaris 8 & Solaris 9 hardware were identical.  All the latest patches 
from Sun were applied prior to the test.  The /etc/system properties were 
identical on each system.  Each system had all software compiled under that 
particular OS, from gcc to OpenLDAP.  OpenLDAP database & setup was 
identical.


Results are at:

<http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/directory/sol8vsol9/sol8-results.html>
<http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/directory/sol8vsol9/sol9-results.html>

General conclusions:

Solaris 9 is about as stable as Solaris 8 and efficient in its replies as 
Solaris 8.

Both systems dropped to 29 hosts right away (this is standard behavior from 
what I've seen).

Solaris 9 dropped down eventually to 27 hosts, Solaris 8 to 28.

Overall query/second rates were comparable.

Therefore, I drop my objections to Solaris 9 & its threading model, which 
seems to have been fixed in the year since I last tested it. ;)

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/Shared Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html