*BSD News Article 77860


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From: aak2@Ra.MsState.Edu (Atif Ahmad Khan)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.solaris,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Benchmarking different Unix Operating Systems
Date: 9 Sep 1996 03:07:05 -0500
Organization: Mississippi State University
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shaworth@intellistar.net (Stephen Haworth) writes:

>This site you refer to does the comparison on an Intel PC platform.
>Let's see what kind of results we would get if we ran "efficiency"
>tests on a machine which was actually designed to run Unix.

>For the casual Unix user, Linux on a PC would probably be fine.  For a
>UNIX professional, you can't beat Solaris on an Ultra-Sparc.  There
>are MANY other considerations other than some random speed tests run
>on a PC.  How about security, scalability, and robustness of the OS??


We are currently using all three operating systems on different machines.
We just cannot decide what we want to go with, for our main web server.

From the benchmarks on the net, Linux seems almost twice as fast as Solaris.
As for security, I am unaware of any significant advantages that Solaris
offers over Linux.   As for robustness, we have been able to crash Solaris
on several occasions running "user-level" programs.  Linux on the other
hand is much harder to crash.  As an example if you have a computer with
Intel EtherExpress PRO/100B card, running Netscape under Solaris as an
avg. user will kill your system's networking.  And just yesteday, our
Solaris machine froze for no apparent reason.

And then Linux is much much more open.  Linux/Debian has a great package
system.  Is easy to upgrade.  Needless to say, we're now leaning more
towards Linux.  I have to admit the following benchmark result from 
http://www.tdl.com/~netex/mb/mb.html  was a major convincing factor :

-------------------------------------------------
..we are presenting these Byte UNIX Benchmark
3.2 results for comparing the relative speeds of three
popular UNIX/UNIX-Clone OS0x92s. Tests were conducted
on Pentium 133MHz machines with 32MB0x92s of RAM, the
Triton-II 430HX chip set and a BusLogic SCSI
controller:
Linux..................................... 12.2
BSD.......................................  9.8
Solaris 2.5...............................  6.2

From these results we can see that Linux is a very
efficient OS. Scores for Linux on the Pentium 133
were nearly as fast as Solaris 2.5 on a 167MHz Sparc
Ultra or a 200MHz Pentium Pro!!!
--------------------------------------------------

I hope that we are not making a mistake.  We are making the decision after
4 months of evaluating Solaris.


Atif Khan
aak2@ra.msstate.edu