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If an application has outgrown particular class of servers it is
important to have the capability to move it to the next class without changing OS
or hardware vendor. It should not lead to the proliferation of Unix flavors
for the reasons mentioned above.
The ability to access huge amount of RAM (say 64G or more) is often as important
in large enterprise environments as raw speed of CPU or number of CPU or transactional
benchmarks. One of the attractive feature of SUN servers is that they typically
configured with more memory then competitors even if hardware capabilities are the
same. And servers based on architectures that are unable to support large
amount of RAM (all old X86 servers) typically perform slower on large enterprise
applications (like databases, SAP/R3, Tivoli, etc) then "large RAM friendly"
architectures.
Solaris 10 6/06 includes the new ZFS file system. Among the most interesting features
of ZFS that increase scalability are:
ZFS definitely belongs to the new generation of file systems, and as such is preferable to old good UFS. It's too early to judge it as we need at least a year for the dust settled, but if successful, it will give Sun a high-performance journalled file system with addressing capabilities beyond available in linux.
Another feature of Solaris that increases scalability is Dtrace. In his May 15, 2007 Intel blog entry Why Linux people lust after DTrace David Stewart noted:
Back in 2002, I was managing the team that worked with Oracle on the engineering side. This was when they were transitioning from developing the database on Solaris to Linux, and we were helping them with this transition. Of the various requests their devs made, one of the first was “when can we get DTrace on Linux?”
I was a bit confused, since I had never heard of DTrace!
Fast forward to 2007, and I sat listening to Bryan Cantrill, the inventor of DTrace show some examples of the power of this little tool which comes with Solaris.
> The kernel has been instrumented with probes which cause no impact if they are not activated, but which allow the DTrace command to program them to fire.
> The command can be used to count probe firings as events and display these counts as histograms for example.
> Besides the kernel, one of the speakers I heard had instrumented the javascript runtime engine to enable DTrace usage, so you can identify where your time is going in a web site.
> It has absolutely no GUI. Someone experienced in the art can simply write DTrace scripts on the fly and get amazing results.
The recent example they used was Twitter. Remember my recent comments about this new micro-blogging application? Well it turns out that the gang at Twitter implemented their system using Ruby on Rails, the new and sexy rapid website programming system. After the article in the New York Times, Twitter has grown in popularity to be the biggest application of Ruby on Rails. And of course, they were having performance problems.
Fortunately for Twitter, they implemented it on Solaris, and thus DTrace to the rescue. Within a few hours, they had identified an issue with how often deep stack back traces were being taken, they get a fix from the Ruby guys and had a 30% performance boost. Pretty snaz, yeah?
No wonder I saw DTrace listed as one of the top 10 reasons Solaris is better than Linux.
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Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
Quotes
War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
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Created Jan 2, 2005. Last modified: March 12, 2019
