This Old SPARC
The story of a geek and his Sun SPARCstations (and UltraSPARCs), and the trials, tribulations,
and small victories that go with the care and feeding of such a menagerie.
Friday, February 23, 2001
Java Benchmarks
I've been waiting until I received zap to post these benchmarks. They aren't scientific, and they may prove more about a given JVM implementation than anything else, but they're still interesting. They're sorted by Total time.
Int Double String IO Total Platform
----- ------ ------ ----- ------ -----------------------------------------------
0.632 1.092 2.048 0.655 4.427 Sun Ultra 10/440 (128M, Java 1.2.1)
0.549 1.425 2.753 0.67 5.397 Sun Ultra 5/400 (128M, Java 1.3)
0.16 2.31 3.07 0.33 5.87 P700 Desktop, 256M, Java 1.3
0.266 3.547 3.719 0.515 8.047 Gateway E5200 (Dual PIII 450, 128M, Java 1.3)
1.102 2.86 3.296 1.15 8.408 Ultra 1 200E, 256M, Java 1.2.1
0.07 0.06 10.065 2.423 12.618 P600 Celeron Laptop, 256M, Java 1.2.2
4.825 19.903 1.439 0.89 27.057 HP 9000/800/N4000 2x440, 4G (under heavy load)
2.207 5.423 22.302 4.305 34.24 Sparc 10 (2x50mhz), 128M, Java 1.2
posted by Mike Thomas 2/23/2001 10:57:03 PM
New Ultra 10 Arrives!
My new Ultra 10/440 is finally here, and yes, I'm excited about it. I published the specs previously so I won't repeat them here. The new machine is named "zap", and is a welcome part of the happy Sun family here at samoht.com.
Netscape 6
With the arrival of zap, I finally got around to downloading Netscape 6 to see if it's worth anything at all. Well, it is, and then again it isn't. It's a terrible hog of disk space, memory and processor. It takes a good 30 seconds to start, and then it's pretty slow about rendering pages (although it does a decent job of rendering once it's done.
The worst thing is that the developers decided to implement all their own widgets. This by itself wouldn't be bad except that they have yet to fully debug them. I crashed NS6 right away today when I hit Ctrl-leftarrow to move left a word in one of their textboxes. This really sucks.
On the other hand, NS6 seems to be able to post to blogger.com, so that's an advantage. Nonetheless, I keep holding out for Opera to come out with a Solaris version of their lightweight browser.
OK, I've just now changed my mind after trying to post this post. I created the post text in a text editor, rather than in the NS6 textbox (since I can't trust it not to crash). It took forever to figure out how to paste into the textbox. Then, when I tried to post the form, NS6 indicated that it was done but clearly it wasn't. I hit refresh, and NS crashed. Piece of shit.
posted by Mike Thomas 2/23/2001 10:40:33 PM
Sunday, February 11, 2001
New Ultra 10 on the Way!
Last night I won an Ultra 10 being auctioned on eBay! I got it for $2,125, which I think is a decent deal, given that new ones with very similar specs go for $3300-$3600. I put the payment in the mail last night; hopefully, the machine will be in my clammy little hands by next Saturday. Add this to the brand new 21" monitor I won off eBay last week, and should receive this week, and you can imagine I'm itching to get my hands on these toys.
The Ultra 10 has the following specs:
- 440Mhz Ultra IIi
- 128M RAM
- 9GB Hard Drive
- 48x CD-ROM Drive
- Creator 3D Graphics (three times the VRAM of my current Creator card)
A little aside for the owner of jeffr.net -- hey Jeff, if you're reading this, you need to know that you're unreachable via your domain name. I can't mail you or ping jeffr.net. You may already know this, but I thought I'd mention it in case it's not obvious from your side.
posted by Mike Thomas 2/11/2001 09:45:25 PM
Friday, February 02, 2001
Useful: The Rough Guide to MBus Modules
posted by Mike Thomas 2/2/2001 05:20:46 PM
Ultra Performs!
I thought this was worth posting. I worked at home Wednesday in order to really get some programming done (my work environment is ridiculously bad - uncomfortable, interruptive, etc.). I decided to do all my work on buzz, the 200mhz Ultra, rather than my work laptop, which is a Pentium Celeron 600mhz. I'd always suspected that this machine was slow. Anyway, I moved my work files onto buzz from Xdrive.com, where I'd placed the work in progress, and got busy. The first compile cycle I ran blew my mind. It took exactly as long on buzz to compile 425 files as it does on that crappy laptop -- 55 seconds. 200mhz Ultra vs. 600mhz Celeron, a tie!
On the Hunt
Regardless of his great performance, the time has come for me to find a faster main machine than buzz. This is not to say that he's causing me day-to-day pain. However, I have a bit of money burning a hole in my pocket, and a new machine seems like a good way to spend it (plus, I really need to get a new monitor -- why not get both? :-)). I'm very on the fence about what to get. For about the same money I could either get an Ultra 5 or 10 and monitor, or a dual-processor Pentium box for about $2500. In pure mhz, the Pentium approach would seem to be the better value. But there's just something about running Suns that makes me happy. They seem so much more elegant than Wintel. This must be something like the feeling that Mac users have about Wintel. However, I'm running elegant hardware, plus a real operating system!
posted by Mike Thomas 2/2/2001 04:40:05 PM
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