I always say, buy the best you can afford. Then again, consider how many Linux PC you can have for the price of the Sun. Run those PCs in a web farm or cluster and that Sun can't match the processing power and speed.
Michael Hyman wrote:
Hi guys,
I have a dilemma that I need input on.
If you were to buy machines to be used as dedicated web servers, which would you go with?
Option 1. A Sun SunFire 280R with 2 Ultra 3 processors and 4GB RAM. Run Solaris 9
Option 2. PC-server with 2 ~2.8GHZ Xeon processors and 8GB RAM. Run Linux
The prices are worlds apart and I think I will get more bang for the buck with PC.
The systems will connect to an Oracle server, via SQL*Net and server both dynamic and static content along with providing download files up to 1GB in size. The files will be stored locally.
What I want to understand is which machine will be faster, be able to handle more peak loading, have a longer lifespan yet be upgradeable for a reasonable price.
In the benchmarking we have done, we run out of Ram before CPU using Apache 1.3.27 and Mod_perl, so we will heavily load the machines with RAM.
I have years of experience with Solaris and SunOS, and little with Linux, but the learning curve seems small and easily handled. It seems to me that Linux is more customizable than Solaris, but then Solaris comes pretty well tuned and does not always need much tweaking.
Apache and all of our software components support both Solaris and Linux, so we can go either way as far as that goes.
I think it comes down to a simple formula of which option gets us the most peak and sustained performance for the least amount of money.
So, I am looking for some input as to which way you might go in my positions.
Thanks in advance for the help!!
Regards...Michael
