D.7 Solaris

These results come from Solaris Version 8 for Intel (released February 2002). Solaris 9 was available when I started these tests, but Sun no longer makes it freely available. I tweaked the kernel by adding these lines to /etc/system:

set rlim_fd_max = 8192

set msgsys:msginfo_msgmax=8192

set msgsys:msginfo_msgmnb=8192

set msgsys:msginfo_msgmni=40

set msgsys:msginfo_msgssz=64

set msgsys:msginfo_msgtql=2048

set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax=2097152

set shmsys:shminfo_shmmni=32

set shmsys:shminfo_shmseg=16

Table D-5 and Figure D-5 summarize the Solaris results. This is the only other operating system, in addition to Linux, in which the aufs storage scheme works well. Interestingly, both aufs and diskd have about the same performance on Solaris, although the actual numbers are much lower than on Linux.

Table D-5. Solaris benchmarking results
Storage scheme	Filesystem	Mount options	Throughput	Response time	Hit ratio
diskd(1)	UFS	`noatime`	56.3	1.53	55.7
aufs(1)	UFS	`noatime`	53.6	1.49	56.6
diskd(2)	UFS		37.9	1.53	55.5
aufs(2)	UFS		37.4	1.49	56.4
coss			32.4	1.47	54.6
ufs(1)	UFS	`noatime`	24.0	1.53	55.6
ufs(2)	UFS		19.0	1.50	56.3

Figure D-5. Solaris filesystem benchmarking traces

Solaris also supports coss, but at nowhere near the rates for Linux and FreeBSD. For some unknown reason, coss on Solaris is limited to 32 transactions per second.