CF7 Performance Solaris/IPlanet vs Windows/IIS

[hitouchsol]

We currently have a Sun UltraEnterprise 250 w/2-400 MHz CPUs/1GB RAM running
Solaris 9/Coldfusion 7/IPlanet 6.1 SP2/Oracle that is running about 40-50%
slower than an Intel Pentium4 (3 GHz) 512 MB RAM running
Windows/IIS/ColdFusion7/Oracle.

Should this be expected? We have debugging settings turned on and the cfm
execution times are very slow on the Solaris server. We have run through the
ColdFusion/IPlanet/Solaris tuning docs when were we on ColdFusion 6.1, but we
still saw slow performance. Are we missing something on the tuning side?

Let me know if you would like for details on the server configurations.
Paulette
[email]hitouchsol@yahoo.com[/email]

[Kronin555]

You're comparing 2 UltraSparc II 400s with a single P4 3 GHz, ultimately.

From
[url]http://groups.google.com/group/comp.benchmarks/browse_thread/thread/3d000eba4903[/url]
e66f/e1eed87da64d4259%23e1eed87da64d4259?sa=X&oi=groups r&start=1&num=3
(a newsgroup thread back in 1999):
Intel PentiumIII @ 500 MHz : SPECint95 = 20.6
Sun UltraSPARC-II @ 450 MHz: SPECint95 = 19.7

Those are the highest SPECint results listed for each architecure. Intel
have always had a good record on integer benchmarks. If you compare the
same chips on Floating Point you get:

Intel PentiumIII @ 500 MHz : SPECfp95 = 14.7
Sun UltraSPARC-II @ 450 MHz: SPECfp95 = 27.0

Note: this is comparing a 450 MHz UltraSparc II with a 500 MHz Pentium III.

I'm by no means an Intel fanboy, but you're comparing 4-5 year old Sun
hardware to 1-2 year old Intel hardware. 3 years is a lifetime in server
hardware.

We currently have a V880 with a single processor tray, 2 750 MHz UltraSPARC
IIIs with 4 GBs of RAM. We have a choice: look at buying a 2nd processor tray
(with another 2x750 MHz UltraSPARC IIIs with 4 GB of RAM) for $11k or buy a
Dell Poweredge 1850, dual 3.06 Xeons with 4 GB RAM and Ultra320 SCSI drives for
$7k. Sun hardware is mainly targeted at huge scalability. If you're not going
to go that way, it's more cost-effective to get commodity hardware. We recently
moved the database from a single 400 MHz ultrasparc II with 2 GB RAM to a
similarly-equipped Dell Poweredge 1750 (2x3.06 GHz Xeons) and saw a
_tremendous_ speed boost (as you'd expect). Now we're looking at doing the same
with the frontend, moving from the V880 to a PE 1850. The nice thing is we can
offload the V880 for at least $15k, covering the cost of the new hardware and
updated licenses.

So, you have to be realistic. How do you expect 4-5 year old hardware to
compare to 1-2 year old hardware?

[hitouchsol]

I agree with all your points, but I was expecting to see the system CPU or
memory bound before I could conclude that we needed more/faster CPUs or even a
different architecture. Right now we are seeing the system CPUs at 60-80% idle
the majority of the day (sar data at 15 minute intervals) and with 1.2GB of RAM
available (random vmstat output during the day). We have the resources
available, but they are not being used, which makes me believe we are missing
something in the tuning of ColdFusion/IPlanet/Solaris. On your Sun server,
were you constantly peaked at 100% CPU utilization? Is that how you determined
that more/faster CPUs were need?