[lllr_finger]

It's historically been a very similar proposition to Solaris: zfs, dtrace, containers, and higher performance.

For as much as I like both FreeBSD and Solaris, Brendan Gregg (mentioned elsewhere in the comments) has a very convincing argument as to why the scales have tipped in favor of Linux in the last few years:

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to-linux...

[jaekash]

ZFS integration was worse in Solaris 10 than in FreeBSD. In Solaris the page cache and ARC was not properly integrated and when using mmap data would be cached twice in both page cache and arc cache and there was weird issues with these contending with each other. I think this was still the case in Solaris 11 also but hard to say since it is closed source and their marketing material was fraudulent. As for the higher performance, I would like to see evidence that Solaris has better performance than Linux.

The one saving grace of Solaris was that it gave you amazing debugging capabilities but the practical outcome of that was just giving you the ability to gain deep insight to see see exactly how bad Solaris was as an operating system. In all my years of using it (10+) I never experienced it as being more performant than Linux and in most cases it was way slower if you did not tune it significantly.

There were some very good ideas that went into Solaris but they were almost invariably poorly implemented.

[Annatar]

Solaris regularly beats Linux in performance on the same hardware, and the subsystems which are "slower" aren't really: they just don't lie and trade safety for performance, like Linux does. Linux is fake performance at the cost of correctness of operation.

[ThA0x2]

Solaris hasn't beaten Linux in performance in the past 5 years in anything.

As a matter of fact, you can't point to a single source that proves your point.

"That which is purported without evidence can be disregarded without evidence."

[jaekash]

I would like to see some evidence to back this claim.

[Annatar]

The burden of proof is on you, since you're the one clearly advocating for Linux here.

[jaekash]

> The burden of proof is on you, since you're the one clearly advocating for Linux here.

Ehh... if you want proof for a specific claim then ask for it. I am asking you for proof of the specific positive claim you made, which is:

> Solaris regularly beats Linux in performance on the same hardware, and the subsystems which are "slower" aren't really: they just don't lie and trade safety for performance, like Linux does. Linux is fake performance at the cost of correctness of operation.

The claims I did make is that in my experience Solaris had to be tuned to be reasonably performant. One example where tuning was needed by default was malloc. The default malloc from Solaris had horrible multi threaded performance . IIRC ZFS also had quite horrible performance by default if not tuned and I recall there were multiple tuning we had to do on new installations specifically relating to mmap to somewhat mitigate the poor integration of ZFS ARC cache and page cache which are documented here: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/225 and https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2016-Jul... there was also a whole wiki on ZFS tuning for various applications including MySQL.

[Annatar]

The Github issue is for (then) ZFS on Linux, not ZFS on Solaris: whoever can read is at a distinct advantage.

The second link is an opinion from some researcher at Pasteur institute in France.

Both are bogus, but thank you for playing.

[Annatar]

Brendan's "convincing" argument can be summed up as "Linux is better in all areas" and listing some relatively new technologies like BPF but which are horrid to program much less understand, and he lists no technical details. Whatever short-circuit suddenly happened in his head, he can be treated as a hostile witness for all intents and purposes. Him and I had a long one on one discussion and I'm not in the least convinced by his "arguments".