[PLUG] Sun's salvation?

Gerrit Huizenga gh at us.ibm.com
Wed Sep 25 16:26:32 UTC 2002


In message <3D91DF77.9040909 at sun.com>, > : Richard Langis writes:
> 
> Well first of all, Linux STILL doesn't scale well past 2-4 
> processors.  At least, that's what I'm still hearing.

A number of vendors and companies are now finding that on more business
related workloads, Linux actually scales reasonably well (not "industry
best") to 8 processors on IA32, and possibly a bit better on systems
like PPC64.  Take the big distros such as Red Hat or UL - their high
end does pretty well up to 6-8 procs with web servers, databases, java
apps, etc.

> This may change with the 2.5->2.6 kernel series...

There is some growing evidence that the 2.5/2.6 kernels will scale
reasonably well to 16 processors with IA32, probably to 24+ processors
with PPC64, other architectures may vary.  Current 2.5 kernels have
a *lot* of scalability related work going in, expect that in the hands
of the distros sometime late next year or early the following, although
for some machines/workloads, a 2.5 kernel is already approaching
"reasonable" stability for development on high end machines.

gerrit




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