Solaris vs RedHat vs Windows

Its been a while since our last Solaris/OpenSolaris post. Now, like buses, suddenly 2 come along at once. Both are related to performance, the first (this one) is about benchmarking Solaris versus other mainstream Operating Systems. The second will follow in a few days, and is about maximising Solaris performance when virtualized on XenServer.

Most people see Solaris as extremely reliable, but one misconception that many hold about Sun's OS is that it is slow. Unfortunately, few take the trouble to assess their choice of OS with an open mind, so Solaris remains a "well kept secret", known only to those who work regularly with all the major server Operating Systems.

One of our consultants has been doing some benchmarks for a client, and came up with results we published here.


Solaris x86 was almost always the best performer above Linux (RedHat), and Microsoft, on HP hardware. From 2 cores to 24 cores with a couple of exceptions, it outperformed the others on Geekbench, a CPU and Memory intensive benchmark.

Not a lot of people know that.