[geeks] Solaris 9/x86 Performance

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

I'm contemplating a recommendation that $work move to Solaris/x86 for
a dozen or so machines (CVS, DNS, DHCP, and other small services).
Currently, there are three machines, one is running Windows 2000, one
DeadRat Linux 7.x, and one FreeBSD 4.x.  Since we've got a handful of
SPARCs doing other things, Solaris would help keep the number of OSes
I have to support down to a minimum.  Solaris also sounds like a good
idea because OpenBSD doesn't support SMP, NetBSD's SMP support is very
green, and I don't like FreeBSD well enough to want to support 12
machines of it.

I'd recommend Linux, but I manglement will insist on running DeadRat
(since they've already "bought a license" for it), and I'd rather run
Windows than that.

However, I'm leery of Solaris 9/x86.  Some of these machines are
"lowly" dual Pentium PRO machines, and the last time I installed
Solaris 7 on a dual Pentium PRO machine, the result was something even
-less- responsive than 2.6 on a SPARCstation 1+.

Has the performance gotten any better?

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  *)  "everything i know about animals i learned from
Thorndale, TX      (*   ORA books."                  --alex j avriette