[conspire] Benchmarking Solaris Express versus Ubuntu: Sun Licensing Issue?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark Weisler (mark.weisler at comcast.net):

> I ran across an interesting benchmark indicating that Ubuntu may outperform 
> Solaris Express in one area at least.
> 
> http://fridge.ubuntu.com/

It really wouldn't be very surprising.  While Solaris has always been a
respectable [semi-]proprietary[1] Unix, and has been improving further,
it's always been a bit heavyweight, and tuned for (1) many-way SMP
instead of the 1-2 processor machines that are Linux's main focus, and
(2) heavily threaded applications (read: Java).  On smaller hardware and
more-typical tasks, it tends to be pretty slow (thus, "Slowaris").

At $PRIOR_FIRM, when I was issued a uniprocessor Ultra10 SPARC
workstation box running Solaris, I was really appalled at just how pokey
it was.  It was really terrible.

> What is also interesting is that this is a public performance
> comparison to a Sun product. If I recall correctly, Sun has
> restrictions prohibiting someone using their equipment and then
> publishing benchmarks or comparison statistics. 

I'm pretty sure that's a paper tiger (not legally enforceable).

[1] As of Solaris 10, Solaris is -- like Apple Darwin -- under a
Mozilla-like licence that lets individual modules, e.g., hardware
drivers from secretive hardware vendors, remain proprietary and
binary-only.  A Solaris 10 or Darwin stripped of proprietary components
would not be _completely_ pointless, but would probably be severely
crippled.