The Anti-Blog Blog: Everyday Engineering and Architecture

Even as long as the Niagara-based servers have been around, it still amazes me that there are issues with getting the best performance out of these servers. I guess there's a difference between "common sense" and "common practice" as one of my business guru's Dave Allman of Knowledge Advantage is fond of saying.

First things first... Goto http://cooltools.sunsource.net/index.html and download the Cool Tools.

If you're in a super hurry and can't seem to wait to download the Cool Tools, at least start off on the right foot:

Use latest revision of Solaris or OpenSolaris available

There are always little bug fixes and optimizations that work their way into the distro for Solaris and OpenSolaris over time. To make sure you are starting off with the best foot forward, you really need to load (and patch) the system before beginning anything.

Update the Firmware

Things like LDOM capabilities and such are only available in recent Firmware updates. So if you go trying to setup or configure the advanced features of a T2000 / T5x20 system such as LDOMs and run into problems, it's likely because the firmware needs to be updated. Even if you don't think you'll play or experiment with these features, just update the firmware before you start and you won't have to worry about. As my Mother used to say, "if you don't do it now, when will you have a chance?"

Best place to get the firmware is off of the Sun Systems Handbook.

Take advantage of the Cool Stack if possible

The Cool Stack offers several optimized components that many people already use such as PHP, MySQL, Apache and so forth. Again these are optimized for the Niagara platforms compared with the generic Solaris versions. Do yourself a favor and use them. You'll be glad you did.

Run your application using the Cool Test to see if it's suited to the CMT architecture

Yes Virginia, while the Niagara process is cool as all get out, it's not suited to every single application out there in the universe. It's a dramatic architecture shift much like RISC (reduced instruction set cpu) was to CISC (complete instruction set cpu). Therefore, some applications as they are today (eg. without recompile or some recoding to be more multithreaded) aren't going to take advantage of CMT, not be optimized for CMT and sometimes down right be obstreperous about running on a CMT-based platform. So test your application to see how compatible it is with Niagara using Cool Test, please?