Bulldozer00's Blog

I’m currently having a blast working on the design and development of a distributed, multi-process, multi-threaded, real-time, software system with a small core group of seasoned developers. The system is being constructed and tested on both a Sparc-Solaris 10 server and an Intel-Ubuntu Linux 2.6.x server. As we add functionality and grow the system via an incremental, “chunked” development process, we’re finding anomalously huge discrepancies in system build times between the two platforms.

The table below quantifies what the team has been qualitatively experiencing over the past few months. Originally, our primary build and integration machine was the Solaris 10 server. However, we quickly switched over to the Linux server as soon as we started noticing the performance difference. Now, we only build and test on the Solaris 10 server when we absolutely have to.

The baffling aspect of the situation is that even though the CPU core clock speed difference is only a factor of 2 between the servers, the build time difference is greater than a factor of 5 in favor of the ‘nix box. In addition, we’ve noticed big CPU loading performance differences when we run and test our multi-process, multi-threaded application on the servers – despite the fact that the Sun server has 32, 1.2 GHz, hardware threads to the ‘nix server’s 2, 2.4 GHz, hardware threads. I know there are many hidden hardware and software variables involved, but is Linux that much faster than Solaris? Got any ideas/answers to help me understand WTF is going on here?