Matthew Garrett ([info]mjg59) wrote,
@ 2008-12-04 02:28:00
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Entry tags:advogato, fedora

Advantage of Linux over Solaris
In response to this:

Idle power draw of Fedora 10: 100W
Idle power draw of Opensolaris 2008-11: 135W

Sure, there are other arguments. But with energy prices the way they are, choosing Solaris is choosing to spend significantly more money on your hosting. Remember to factor that into your TCO calculations.

(Testing done on a 4-way AMD with a Radeon X1900 graphics card, which is what I happen to have to hand. Out of the box configuration.)


(18 comments) - (Post a new comment)


(Anonymous)
2008-12-04 04:25 am UTC (link)
The blog you link to really is rather dismissive of Linux, isn't it? I particularly like the bit about scaling to 200-proc systems... hasn't SGI been doing that with Linux for years?

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]realmotk
2008-12-04 06:19 am UTC (link)
It's just the usual coughing and spluttering about Enteprisiness that Sun peoples come up with when they wake up sweating in the arse-end of the night.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]sneakums
2008-12-04 06:23 am UTC (link)
I think they got patches for 4096 CPUs into 2.6.27.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]mobbsy
2008-12-04 10:07 am UTC (link)
The original post was targetted at "database people"; without going out of my way to measure it, I'd suspect that the bulk of power usage by any serious database system would be in the storage.

More generally, once you get past the FUD in the Sun post, he has a very valid point about storage management. At least when I last tried running a large database on Linux, it was relatively awkward in anything other than common-case. I haven't tried ZFS, last time I used Solaris was about 5 years ago, but JFS on the AIX LVM was significantly more capable than the Linux LVM.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]mjg59
2008-12-04 10:19 am UTC (link)
The frustrating thing here is that Linux is (in theory) about as capable as AIX here, but the management tools utterly fail at making it anywhere near as easy as it was with SMIT on AIX 3.2.3.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]userunknown
2008-12-04 01:48 pm UTC (link)
I wouldn't even know where to begin with this one:

"If you have a problem with a part of Linux other than the kernel, you may end up at the short end of the "we don't support that particular add-on, but we're sending a request out to the community and we hope that the grad student who developed it three years ago will see it and respond" stick from your Linux vendor. With Solaris you contact Sun and we fix it."

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]trs80 [typekey.com]
2008-12-04 02:37 pm UTC (link)
"All the public officials I talked with really believe in the potential of Free Software for a developing country like Ecuador. This only makes more relevant, and worthy of careful consideration, a comment I got from them: there, they say, is no coordination or common vision among the developers of the several FOSS applications they need to deploy."

Not quite the same I admit, and Sun is exposed to this as they use more and more community OSS.

http://lwn.net/Articles/309067/

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]damerell
2008-12-04 06:32 pm UTC (link)
I'd start by describing my experiences with Sun. "I notice instead of RFC1918 addresses, you've pulled a live class A out of thin air for this cluster."

(Reply to this) (Parent)
MS?
[info]blah.generaciongeek.com
2008-12-04 10:28 pm UTC (link)
May i ask if you could measure the power draw on the same hardware with windows? :)

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: MS?
[info]mjg59
2008-12-04 10:37 pm UTC (link)
110W at idle.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: MS?
(Anonymous)
2008-12-04 11:46 pm UTC (link)
Windows XP/2003/2008?

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: MS?
[info]mjg59
2008-12-05 10:00 am UTC (link)
That's Vista, but with an idle desktop.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: MS?
(Anonymous)
2008-12-07 09:39 pm UTC (link)
If you have time, it'll be interesting to see the figures for Windows Server 2k3 and/or 2k8.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Perhaps this ties in with Solaris' current lack of tickless
(Anonymous)
2008-12-04 10:29 pm UTC (link)
Ages ago I remember reading on Ted's blog ( http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2007/11/18/does-perfect-code-exist-abstractions-part-1/ ) about how Solaris had a very well written cyclic timer loop would go off more often under Solaris than Linux (with tickless enabled). I don't know if Solaris has been rearchitectured since but it might tie in with the results you've seen.

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: Perhaps this ties in with Solaris' current lack of tickless
(Anonymous)
2008-12-04 10:39 pm UTC (link)
Even so, Linux without tickless on the same hardware isn't drawing as much as Solaris.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]gibigiane
2008-12-05 12:51 am UTC (link)
Thanks for doing the measurement, Matthew. It's good information to know and something to strive for. :-)

Within the OpenSolaris group, we know that we've got some work to do with respect to power savings (including upcoming tickless clock support) but nonetheless, there's interesting technical work taking place just as with your and other's work in the Linux kernel.

(Reply to this)

Power draw
(Anonymous)
2008-12-05 03:11 am UTC (link)
On my fileserver with AMD BE-2400 (dual core 2.3 GHz), 4GB RAM, built-in video and 3x WD Green Power 750Gb, Linux idles at 60W, Solaris at 95W.

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: Power draw
[info]king_of_wrong
2008-12-05 08:48 am UTC (link)
Interesting that the same difference is maintained... if it's not just a sampling artifact, it would suggest that solaris is doing 35J more work than linux every second, rather than just failing to power down the CPU appropriately.

Something for the minimum-algorithm-energy optimisation people?

(Reply to this) (Parent)

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