Solaris 11 Struggles Against Linux Distributions

[kraftman]

Wow, troll much? I suggested 2 different, but more accurate, ways to test Solaris vs. Linux and your comment is "that's stupid." Take a look at what software raid does to performance (btrfs vs. ext4 for instance) and then try again, genius.

You suggested another meaningless and not accurate benchmark. That's all. Don't you think it's more fair to compare UFS to Ext2? They're both marked as stable file systems while btrfs is not.

[kgardas]

To defend or to burden it? 32bit should have less overhead.

To defend it. Keep in mind that we're talking about x86 versus amd64 and not about ppc32 versus ppc64 here! It's a known fact that compiling for amd64 makes sense because of much more available registers on the CPU in this mode in comparison with x86 (i.e. you get better performance on amd64 than you do on x86 on the same CPU if you don't understand it). So if they test several flavor of linuxes, then it would be honest to test also 32bit and 64bit apps on the same Solaris to see if it makes difference or not.
Cheers!
Karel

[jadrevenge]

Tests aren't flawed in this case, because to have some equivalent to UFS Linux should be using Ext2... If Solaris does only have two file systems it's not Linux problem. btrfs isn't stable yet, so your suggestion is stupid.

While in general I don't agree with kraftman, in this case I do, strongly.

BTRFS is not stable enough for general application, and most importantly is not the default on Linux, whereas ZFS is the default on Solaris11 ... I'm not even sure you _could_ install on UFS any more.

the tests performed were the defaults for the systems so it seems fair to me.

as an aside, the Illumos guys are working on "fast hashes" to get a better performance from ZFS systems, and are upgrading the system to be compiled on significantly newer versions of GCC ...

When Illumos gets to a point where it is "stable" then it might be worth while doing these tests again, even if Linux has moved the goal-posts again.

[vik1]

@jadrevenge: no, the tests performed were not the default! Fedora uses BTRFS as the default and they changed it to use ext4. Anytime you use software RAID you incur performance penalties; that is well known and should be a giant caveat at the top of this article.

For an accurate comparison, do one of the following:
1) Solaris: ZFS boot partition and UFS for all others vs. Linux ext4 all partitions
2) Solaris: ZFS all partitions vs. Linux btrfs all partitions.

[ryao]

@jadrevenge: no, the tests performed were not the default! Fedora uses BTRFS as the default and they changed it to use ext4. Anytime you use software RAID you incur performance penalties; that is well known and should be a giant caveat at the top of this article.

For an accurate comparison, do one of the following:
1) Solaris: ZFS boot partition and UFS for all others vs. Linux ext4 all partitions
2) Solaris: ZFS all partitions vs. Linux btrfs all partitions.

ZFS should outperform UFS on Solaris. However, it does need to be installed with ashift set to the disk geometry for proper performance. In Michael's case, this is ashift=12 for hard drives or ashift=13 for SSDs.

[kraftman]

@jadrevenge: no, the tests performed were not the default! Fedora uses BTRFS as the default and they changed it to use ext4. Anytime you use software RAID you incur performance penalties; that is well known and should be a giant caveat at the top of this article.

I don't know where you got that info from. btrfs is not default in Fedora. Btw. why don't you just ask Michael to do benchmarks you want to see?

[vik1]

I stand corrected, there was a push to make BTRFS the default in Fedora 16 but it did not prevail. Offending link here: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/0...tem-by-default

[liam]

@jadrevenge: no, the tests performed were not the default! Fedora uses BTRFS as the default and they changed it to use ext4. Anytime you use software RAID you incur performance penalties; that is well known and should be a giant caveat at the top of this article.

For an accurate comparison, do one of the following:
1) Solaris: ZFS boot partition and UFS for all others vs. Linux ext4 all partitions
2) Solaris: ZFS all partitions vs. Linux btrfs all partitions.

Fedora doesn't use btrfs by default, nor will they until btrfs' repair tool is more general.

[Ansla]

@jadrevenge: no, the tests performed were not the default! Fedora uses BTRFS as the default and they changed it to use ext4. Anytime you use software RAID you incur performance penalties; that is well known and should be a giant caveat at the top of this article.

For an accurate comparison, do one of the following:
1) Solaris: ZFS boot partition and UFS for all others vs. Linux ext4 all partitions
2) Solaris: ZFS all partitions vs. Linux btrfs all partitions.

What "software RAID" are you talking about? RAID only makes sense when there are multiple phisical disks involved, why would ZFS use RAID on a single disk? Maybe you meant checksums?

[vik1]

Yes, I was referring to the checksum functionality which is similar to having a software RAID 5 equivalent (but only one disk).