Riba <riba@ml1.net> wrote:
> I've been setting a Sun Netra i (basically a Sparc Station 5, 110 MHz 
> processor, 256 MB RAM, 10k RPM 9.1 GB hard drive) to use as a web 
> server.
> However I'm wondering a bit about the performance. I assumed that it 
> would be plenty powerful for running a single web site 
> (apache/mysql/PHP).
> I'm running some local tests, and it hesitates a bit when opening the 
> site. Top shows that mysql eats about 30% of the CPU when accessing the 
> site. It is underpowered for this task, or is there something I'm 
> missing? Thanks!


 It's possible (even likely) that if you didn't specify otherwise, when
you built Apache, Mysql and PHP that the binaries are not optimized for
your SPARC 5, which is a "sun4m" machine (V8 of the SPARC CPU
architecture). Instead, by default they were probably built to run on any
SPARC machine, which includes the older sun4c (SPARC V7) machines, like a
SPARC 1, 1+, or 2 (and many others).

 If you didn't do so previously, calling gcc like this:

gcc -mcpu=v8 -mtune=supersparc


...will improve performance a bit by building code that takes advantage of
SPARC V8-only features.  It won't help tons, but will help some.


 If you are building from /usr/pkgsrc, see the man page for mk.conf on how
to add these options.

 Here are some URLs:

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/SPARC-Options.html

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6136&page=1

 -johan