On 1/17/07, Fernando Perez <fperez.net@gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/17/07, Jean-Paul Calderone <exarkun@divmod.com> wrote:
It looks like a single core on a T1000 is much less powerful than a single core in a Dell 2850, so this might account for some of the difference.
That is precisely the case. A quote
Obviously, the UltraSparc T1 will perform quite poorly on workloads that require single-threaded performance. For those types of non-multithreaded workloads, Sun will rely for the time being on its Opteron-powered Galaxy server line. In 2008, however, Sun plans to release a new design codenamed "Rock" with better single-threaded performance.
taken from http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051114-5569.html
You can find a bit more info here:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051116-5584.htm
This Sun hardware is built /specifically/ for running /highly/ multithreaded code, it has always sucked royally at single-threaded performance, this was very much a design decision.
There is a "backend" C module that our Twisted server front ends, and it is highly multi-threaded. So the T1000 is PERFECT for our application, except that now Twisted is the bottleneck. :-( Unfortunately we have a 11th hour constraint of a vendor library that we are required to use, it is only available on Sparc Solaris. So we either scrap our Twisted implementation and have to spend extra time on another network handling layer, or run 5 times as many instances of our server to service the same number of concurrent clients.