Day 59 of 60: Final thoughts

This system will be going back to Sun soon, while I wait to find out whether or not they've decided to grant me the system. In the meantime, here are some final thoughts on the last 59 days.

Day 59 of 60: Developer benchmarks (pt 4)

Yesterday's tests show that using gcc on both FreeBSD and Solaris yields a marked improvement in the time taken to compile Perl.

However, despite the big difference in compile times, the run-times of Perl's test suite aren't dramatically affected. The worst performer, Perl running on Solaris, compiled with Sun's cc and optimisation is 6% slower than the best performer, Perl running on FreeBSD, compiled with gcc and optimisation. This test involved a great deal of IO and process creation, and I thought that that might be part of the reason for the differences. So I've been using a Perl based application, SpamAssassin, to test whether or not there are big differences between the run times of the various Perl interpreters.

Day 58 of 60: Developer benchmarks (pt 3)

Yesterday I looked at performance compiling Sendmail on Solaris and FreeBSD using Sun's compiler (on Solaris) and gcc (on both systems).

In the tests gcc come out handily ahead, with gcc on FreeBSD being 16% faster than gcc on Solaris with low optimisation options, and 12% faster than gcc on Solaris with optimisation turned on. Sun's compiler was over twice as slow as gcc on either system.

Today I've been looking at the time taken to compile Perl on both systems, using both compilers, with and without optimisation.

Day 57 of 60: Developer benchmarks (pt 2)

As I explained on day 55, I've been comparing GCC and the Sun Studio compiler on Solaris, to GCC running on FreeBSD to see if there are any significant differences in the time taken to compile the applications, and if there is, whether that difference is reflected in the time taken by the applications to run. I used gcc 3.4.3 on both systems.

Day 55 of 60: Installing FreeBSD on a Sun Ultra 40

Fetching and installing FreeBSD was relatively painless. I downloaded the ISO image for FreeBSD 6.1 (AMD64 build), and wrote it to a blank CD.

When I reinstalled Solaris some weeks back I made sure to leave some space on the disk for FreeBSD. So then it was a case of booting from the CD.

This was my first time booting FreeBSD AMD64, but the process was reassuringly familiar to that on x86. FreeBSD is considerably more verbose at boot time than Solaris 10 is, being much more like earlier Solaris releases. Personally I find this to be no bad thing, at least as the default option.

It was then that I ran in to a problem -- the keyboard on the machine is USB. It works fine during the boot process, but once the kernel's started it was nonresponsive.

Day 55 of 60: Developer benchmarks (pt 1)

The last week has been quite busy with work that's not related to this project. Mindful that the 60 day time limit is almost up, and aware that I've not done any actual benchmarking of this workstation -- vis a vis "How does Solaris on this hardware compare against another OS on this system?", I've started doing some investigation.

Sun bill this machine as a developer workstation, so I thought I'd look at how speedy it is at carrying out tasks that developers do. I also thought it would be worthwhile carrying out a few performance benchmarks relating to a real-world application that I currently run on Solaris.