Solaris 11 Struggles Against Linux Distributions

For some interesting benchmarks to share before the start of the weekend, here's some recent test results conducted at Phoronix that's comparing Oracle Solaris 11 Express, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.2, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Wheezy, and Fedora 17.

The focus of this testing is to see how Solaris 11 Express (the 11.11 release) is performing compared to a variety of Linux distributions plus Debian GNU/kFreeBSD -- the Debian GNU user-land but with the FreeBSD 9.0 kernel rather than Linux. OpenIndiana was also going to be tested as the open/community Solaris, but the latest development release was running into problems on the Intel Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition system used for testing.

All of these operating systems were tested in their stock configurations with their default packages and settings. For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it was also tested with GCC/G++/GFortran 4.5.3 in addition to its default GCC 4.6 compiler. This was done since Solaris 11 has GCC 4.5, to rule out some compiler performance differences, but the default compiler is one of the many choices that operating system vendors make when preparing a release. The 64-bit releases of all operating systems were tested.

The test system used for benchmarking all of these operating systems was an Intel Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge" Extreme Edition system with 8GB of RAM and a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD and an AMD Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. Good enough, let's get to some results!