Mapserver on Solaris 10

[Mark MacLennan]

At 07:20 PM 2/28/2006 -0800, you wrote:
>Steve,
>Any chance you could also do some testing with GEOS and PostGIS on  
>that machine?  This is Solaris 10 on Athlon 64, right? An interesting  
>platform combination, would be nice to know we handle it...
>Paul

The Sun Fire T2000 is a Sun's new UltraSPARC-based server
(http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t2000/), not based on
Athlon 64. Sun is really trying to promote this server as it
is rather innovative (http://www.sun.com/emrkt/trycoolthreads/index.html).
What makes it innovative is the low-power UltraSPARC T1 processor
(http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/) which has 8 cores
each of which supports 4 threads (i.e., up to 32 simultaneous threads).
The downside of this processor is that it is is weak in supporting
floating point operations, the chip only has a single FPU shared by
all of the processors.

If you have applications that are highly threaded (e.g. a web server
or Java applications), they should really fly on this server. However,
it is not clear from what I have read that there is any big advantage
of this server for applications that are not multi-threaded, even with
it's multi-core processor.

Some initial reviews of the T2000 have been published:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2657
http://www.networkcomputing.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=175803241
http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2005/121905-sun-fire-test.html?page=2

(I am hoping to see one of these servers at work soon on loan from Sun
for some benchmarking ..., mainly for java, ldap, and web server tests.)

While I haven't yet compiled Mapserver under Solaris 10 yet, this OS is
highly backward compatible with Solaris 8/9 (which MapServer works
on) binaries. However, I suspect that for best best performance on the T2000,
one might want to recompile everything using Sun's free Studio 11 C compiler.
I too would be very curious to see how well this server works with
Mapserver and related applications such as PostGIS under various scenarios
(e.g. with Studio 11 versus GNU C, types of application load, etc.).

- Mark


On Feb 27, 2006, at 11:51 PM, Steven Haigh wrote:
> Sun are sending me a Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads system to play around
> with, and I'd like to throw mapserver on it and give it a major  
> workout.
> The current site we run is at http://melbourne.wireless.org.au -  
> with the
> mapserver part being at http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/maps.
>
> While looking through the archives etc, I don't see any mention of
> Mapserver running on Solaris 10. Does anyone have any experience in
> running this combination?