[rt-users] Some little performance notes...

[Matthew Goheen]

During our latest upgrade, we were trying to determine which platform to install
RT on.  We had three basic choices:
	o Install on our Sun V440 server (main production file server, 4 SPARC CPUs)
	o Install on a NEW Sunfire X2200 server (dual Athlon CPUs) running Solaris 10
	o Install on same X2200 running RHEL 5

We did some very basic tests.  We installed RT 3.6.4 on the V440 (also Solaris 10)
and tried the X2200 under both Solaris 10 and RHEL 5.  All machines ran Postgres
(I believe they were all Postgres 8.1 -- but we used whatever came with the
standard install).

Our existing RT machines was an IBM x335 (dual Xeon 3GHz) running RT 3.4.2 under
RHEL 3.

In a nutshell, we found:
	o The V440 was about 3-4 times slower than our our existing machine
	o The X2200 running Solaris was marginally faster than our existing machine
	o The X2200 running RHEL 5 was about three times faster than our existing machine

We went with RHEL 5.

We did not spend any time trying to figure out WHY Solaris 10 was so slow.  We did
notice that times under Solaris would vary quite a bit, even repeating the same
search (this was not the case under Linux).

Matt Goheen
University of Rochester
Laboratory for Laser Energetics