Poor python and/or Zope performance on Sparc

[Ivan Voras]

joa2212 wrote:

> We have a Sun T1000 with 8 cores and 8 GB of RAM. First, I installed
> Solaris 10 because I know this OS better than Debian Linux. Result:
> poor Performance. After that I decided to migrate to debian:

Do you know the architecture of this machine? It's extremely streamlined
for data throughput (IO) at the expense of computational ability. In
particular:

- it runs at a relatively small clock speed (1 GHz - 1.4 GHz)
- it's terrible for floating-point calculations because there is only
one FPU shared by all 32 logical processors

While it will be screamingly fast for serving static content, and pretty
decent for light database jobs, this not an optimal platform for dynamic
web applications, especially for Python since the language's so dynamic
and it doesn't support SMP. Since it's so optimized for a certain
purpose, you can freely consider it a special-purpose machine, rather
than a general-purpose one.

Even if you manage to get Zope to spawn parallel request handlers
(probably via something like fastcgi), if the web application is
CPU-intensive you won't be happy with its performance (for CPU-intensive
tasks you probably don't want to spawn more than 8 handlers, since
that's the number of physical cores in the CPU).


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