[jabl]

Sun (you might add Oracle as well, but I think at that point whatever they could have done was too little too late) mismanagement, and Linux was/is better in many respects? It wasn't called "Slowlaris" for nothing?

And it's not like Linux is somehow famous for poor scalability, unless you're talking about the 1990'ies. Yes, back in the 1990'ies it was certainly much worse than Solaris. But for the 2.6 and subsequent releases SGI and others put a lot of work into improving it. SGI at some point sold 4096-way (might even have been 4096 cores and 8192 hw threads?) single-image supercomputers running Linux, which AFAIK is bigger than anything Solaris has been deployed on.

That being said, most HPC systems consist of 1 or 2-socket nodes connected via a network, so the kernel scaling to such extreme systems isn't that relevant in the vast majority of deployments.

[Annatar]

“Slowlaris” days were 15 years ago with Solaris 8. Meanwhile, Solaris and illumos (and therefore SmartOS) are the only operating systems I know of which provide CPU bursting. If you go put Linux and SmartOS on the same intel CPU based hardware, SmartOS is likely to beat it in performance. What might have been 15 years ago has long since (2005 with Solaris 10) not been the case.