Sunday October 17, 2004

Solaris vs Red Hat Sorry guys, the heading is not mine. Its coming from the discussion at www.osnews.com where the Solaris 10 networking is being discussed. It is pretty interesting discussion if you filter out few of the usual posting where people don't really know the facts.

I was surprised to see a large number of people who know Solaris voicing their positive opinions. Normally, people from Solaris world are not very vocal on discussion groups and public forums. So that is a surprising (and good) change. Guys keep it up!

Someone mentioned that why are we not targetting Windows. Come on guys, you got to be serious. I am an engineer and do you think I design networking architecture targeted to beat windows :) As pointed out in the comments, they are not even on my radar. Maybe in next twenty years, their technology will match our current stuff but then we would have hopefully moved on :^) And yes, as I am told, we do beat Windows 2003 by 20-30% on a 2 CPU x86 box (Opteron 2x2.2GHz with 2 Gb RAM) on webbench (static, dynamic and ecommerce). There are probably more benchmarks but frankly we hadn't had time to compare or publish. Our sole aim right now is to improve the real customer workloads and we are depending on customers to tell us these numbers.

As for AIX and HP-UX (and I am going to get in trouble now with my bosses for saying this), they just don't exist in any significant manner. I have talked to a large numbers of customers in past two years since part of our approach is to understand what the customer is having trouble with and what he will need going forward, and let me be really honest, I don't see HP-UX at all and very little AIX. Yes I do see IBM and HP machines, but they are all running Linux (please no flames, this is just my experience).

Again, when we are designing/writing new code, we do like to set some targets. When it comes to scaling across large number of CPUs, we have always done very well because thats where we focused. We never really looked at 1-2 CPU performance before since it was always easy to add more processors on SPARC platforms. Linux on the other hand has really simple code that allowed it to perform very well on 1 CPU. So our challenge was to come up with an architecture that could beat Linux on low end and still allowed us to scale linearly on high end and sure enough, we created FireEngine . Its the same code that runs on SPARC platforms scaling linearly and runs pretty fast on 2 CPU x86 platforms. And as you add more CPUs on x86 (going to 4 and 8 and then dual core), we just start becoming very compelling architecture.

As for some people commenting about the validity on the numbers comparing Solaris 10 and Apache with RHEL AS3 and Apache on www.sun.com, they are on the same H/W. Its a 2x2.2 Ghz Opteron box (V20z) with 6Gb RAM and 2 Broadcom Gig NICs. The numbers were done on webbench and the other major web performance benchmark that we can't talk about since the numbers are not published yet. These numbers are for out of box Solaris 10 32bits with no tuning at all (entire FireEngine focus was on out of box performance for real customer workloads). And frankly, we are not really interested in benchmarks because all the Linux web performance numbers (for instance SPECweb99) are published using TUX or Red Hat content accelarator. I haven't come across a single customer who is running TUX so far. So why doesn't someone publish a Linux Apache number without any benchmark special and we will be sure to put resources to meet/beat those numbers. That I think would be a more fair comparison. And thats why I am far more impressed by customer quotes like the one from "Bill Morgan, CIO at Philadelphia Stock Exchange Inc.", where he said that Solaris 10 improved his trading capacity by 36%. Now we are not talking about a micro benchmark here but a system level capacity. This was on a 12 way E4800 (SPARC platform). Basically, they loaded Solaris 10 on the same H/W and were able to do 36% more stock transactions per second.

And once again, I am not really anti Linux or anything. I just need something to compete against in a good natured way (HP-UX, AIX, IRIX are not around anymore, and I still can't bring myself down to compete with Windows). Before FireEngine, it was Linux guys who used to pull my leg saying when will I make Solaris perform as well as Linux on 1 CPU. Well, Solaris does perform now and some of the guys who used ot pull my leg took me out for beer when they loaded Solaris express on their system. And knowing them, I might be buying the next round somewhere down the line.

Oh, before I end, I wanted to just touch on why we are not comparing against RHEL AS4beta. Well, its not us who is doing the comparing but our customers. And that is because although Solaris 10 is due to ship now, things like FireEngine have been available and stable for almost a year. If I am to do the comparison, I will pick the latest in Red hat but I will compare it against Solaris 10 Update (due out 3-6 months after Solaris 10). And you know what, we haven't exactly been sitting around for the past year. Solaris 10 update will improve performance over S10 FCS by another 20-25% on networking workloads.

(2004-10-17 00:32:26.0) Permalink Comments [6]

Saturday October 16, 2004

More Solaris on x86 Performance data www.sun.com is featuring performance on Solaris x86 platforms. BTW, couple of you asked how the new TCP/IP stack can scale almost linearly. I am trying to understand how much I am allowed to say on blogs like this but hopefully next week sometime I will give a more technical rundown for the geeks out there. (2004-10-16 13:34:12.0) Permalink Comments [9]

Tuesday October 12, 2004

Solaris 10 on x86 really performs Someone pointed me to this article from George Colony, CEO, Forrester Research and the real story from Tom Adelstein. Both are pretty interesting articles but one of the feedbacks "Untrue... Learn the Facts first" to Tom kind of got me motivated to write this blog. "Solaris 10 on x86" can really match Linux in performance and better yet, linearly scale over large number of CPUs (remember that 8 CPUs x86 blades are here already and then we will start seeing 8 CPUs, dual core blades). The new network architecture (FireEngine) in S10 allows the same code to give a huge performance win on 1 and 2 CPU configurations and give linear scaling when more CPUs are added.

Take for instance web performance. We have improvemed 2 CPU performance by close to 50% (compared to Solaris 9) using a real web server like Apache, Sun One Web Server, Zeus, etc without any gimmicks like kernel caching etc. Its just plain webserver with TCP/IP and a dumb NIC. Some of our Solaris express customers are telling us that we are outperforming RHEL AS3 by almost 15-35% on the same hardware.

Interested in more numbers - On static and dynamic webbench, Solaris 10 is at par with RHEL AS3 on 2 CPU v20z while its ahead by 15% on webbench Ecommerce benchmark. On the same box, we can saturate a 1Gb NIC using only 8-9% on a 2.2Ghz Opteron processor but the real killer deal is that our 10Gb drivers are coming up and Alex Aizman fromS2io just informed me that we are pushing close to 7.3Gbps traffic on a v20z (with 2 x 1.6 Ghz Opterons) with more than 20% CPU to spare. We haven't even ported the driver to the high performance Nemo framework or enabled any hardware features as yet. So I am expecting a huge upside in next 2-3 months as the driver gets ported to Nemo (Paul and Yuzo should tell you more about Nemo sometime soon).

The improvements are not restricted to TCP only. We are doing a FireEngine followup for UDP which improves Tibco benchmark by 130% and Volano Mark benchmark by 30%. The customer tells us that we are outperforming RHEL AS3 by almost 15% on the same hardware. Adi et. al. can add some more details about UDP performance.

And the big killer features on Opterons, you can run 64bit Oracle or webserver on 64bit Solaris to take advantage of the bigger VM space but leave bulk of your apps to be 32bits which run unchanged.

I am not claiming the best performing OS title (atleast not yet!) for Solaris 10, but guys, we are still ramping up! Every new project going in Solaris is now delivering double digits performance improvements (FireEngine architecture has opened the door) and soon I will claim that title :) I must add that all these gains come on the same hardware without application needing to change at all. Just get the latest Solaris Express and see it for yourself.

And BTW, most of us at SUN are really pretty friendly towards Linux. Sure we compete in a good natured way. And Tom did hit the nail on the head regarding why people at SUN don't like Red Hat - Its really has to do with them having transformed free Linux into a not so free Linux. (2004-10-12 01:19:43.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Thursday October 07, 2004

Thanks for the interest. More performance has been ordered! Wow! Judging from the number of email I received and the interest in network performance in general, looks like real people also read these blogs (other than robots and crawlers). I really appreciate the interest. Keep those emails coming as well and I will be more diligent in updating these logs frequently with interesting stuff and updates. As requested by most of you, I have placed a quaterly recurring order for more performance from getmemoreperf.com. The order tracking number is "sunay at sun dot com" :) (2004-10-07 11:27:36.0) Permalink

Monday October 04, 2004

When will you have enough performance? For someone who never had a web-page, this blog business is really frightening so bear with me if I seem like a novice. I wonder if someone actually reads these pages or its just the robots, crawlers and zombies generating the hits ;^) Anyway since Carol (our PM) thinks this is useful medium to tell people outside Sun what I am thinking instead of them finding out when the product actually ships, here goes.

My name is Sunay Tripathi and I am a Sr. staff Eng. in Solaris Networking and security technologies. Yes, we are the people who make the 'Net' work in 'Network is the computer'. I also go by as the architect of FireEngine, the new TCP/IP stack in Solaris 10 for people who have tried Solaris 10 already and are pretty happy with the performance (which is most).

So what am I working on these days - well I hear 10Gb is happening. And I also hear that 10Gb is not enough. People are wanting 20-30Gbps bandwidth coming into 4 CPU opteron blades and still have meaningful processing power left!! Well, you do that and watch the interrupts go up like crazy and the system behave in more twisted ways than you can imagine and trust me, its not nice. But FireEngine comes to the rescue. We can tame the interrupts and do exactly what people want. I'll tell you the details some other day unless John Fowler can beat me to it by blogging soon.

Fairness and security is something that keeps me awake these days. A large section of customers tell me that they see 'http' literally disappearing in next 3-5 years and everything will be 'https' (SSL) and they don't want to sacrifice CPU just doing crypto and they don't want crypto to overwhelm rest of the traffic. Well, OK, they said QOS but what they actually meant was fairness without any guarantees. I am hard pressed to see why CNN will go 'https' but they do have a point - Yahoo mail should really be SSL protected by default!! So I am building fairness as part of the architecture instead of another add-on layer.

So let me tell you what else do I do other than designing and writing code. I like to hang out with my old stanford and IIT buddies who keep telling me that how we can combine forces to build the next big thing for internet (some day). I also love watching my 11 months old learn to walk. He is already hooked on to my workstation and has his own desktop now. Not surprising given that he sees his Mom and Dad spend 80% of their waking hours on these things. But what he really wants is my Acer Ferrari laptop running 64bit Solaris and I tell him dream on buddy :) My other passion is fast cars (after fast code) and Taekwando. I am a black belt and used to practice with Stanford Taekwando. Had a string of injuries last year which has kept me away but I have started training again and will be back soon.

Well, thats who I am. But let me tell you the real reason why I am doing this (apart from the fact even Sin-yaw and the rest of the perf team has a blog) - I actually want to hear back from you guys. Tell me what latest and greatest thing you are working on or dreaming off and how Solaris can make it happen for you. Not sure how the feedback thing works on this blog but you can always drop me a direct email. The address is pretty simple - sunay at sun dot com. I would also love to hear your opinions if you already tried Solaris 10.

And as for when will you have enough performance? The answer is never!

(2004-10-04 00:30:20.0) Permalink Comments [1]