Hello
We've been going through this same process with regard to the Solaris vs Linux application server decision. We've always run on Solaris, and currently our application tier consists of 2 T5120s carved into 8 application servers using Solaris zones. The application is generally slow, and testing has shown that the processing time is being spent at the app tier, with results from the database being returned quickly. As we had some Dell blades that we could borrow temporarily (2.4GHz cores), we built a new dev application tier and compared it to our current SPARC dev tier. The Dell blades were split into multiple app servers using VMWare, purely to allow good usage of the hardware resources.
Some example results from an automated test script (function/time in seconds):
Linux/Dell
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Front Page - 5.1
Logging in - 2.6
Modules Tab - 1.7
Content Collection - 2.3
Announcements - 1.3
Notifications Dashboard - 2.7
Enter Module - 2.2
Module Content - 2.2
Solaris/T5120
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Front Page - 10.2
Logging in - 9.3
Modules Tab - 4.9
Content Collection - 8.3
Announcements - 6.0
Notifications Dashboard - 14.6
Enter Module - 9.8
Module Content - 15.3
The largest differences were for functions such as announcements, where for many users a large amount of data is returned from the database and then filtered at the app tier.
We'd have liked to also test a T4-2, as we'd probably get similar results, but after getting quotes we found we couldn't really justify not switching to the Linux option. I'm currently building the new platform, so will be able to to provide you an update on how this works in Live in a couple of months.
Thanks
Jon
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