vasu

Hi,

I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on
it. It has 512 mb ram. One of the users in the network wants a solaris
box with better performance for his application, i thought of
suggesting to upgrade memory from 512mb to 1GB but i really donno how
to find out about the specs of this existing box. the memory i got to
know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
earliest and proceed with a sales order.

any help in this regard is highly appreciated.

thanks
vasu.

Fredrik Lundholm

In article <4a3246ef.0403170224.6551712b@posting.google.com >,
vasu <waasoo@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
>box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on


>know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
>design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
>earliest and proceed with a sales order.


Its not certain that you can fit more memory into your U10.
You would be much better of getting a recent machine like a V210 (rackmount)
or a Sun Blade 1500 (dektop-tower) or a V250 (tower). This will provide
the memory and CPU capacity needed for your users.

/wfr
Fredrik



--
Fredrik Lundholm
dol @ ce.chalmers.se

UNIX admin

"vasu" <waasoo@yahoo.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:4a3246ef.0403170224.6551712b@posting.google.c om...
> Hi,
>
> I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
> box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on
> it. It has 512 mb ram. One of the users in the network wants a solaris
> box with better performance for his application, i thought of
> suggesting to upgrade memory from 512mb to 1GB but i really donno how
> to find out about the specs of this existing box. the memory i got to
> know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
> design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
> earliest and proceed with a sales order.
>
> any help in this regard is highly appreciated.

What would you like to know? What will the machine you will be purchasing
be used for?

You can run the following commands on the UltraSPARC10:

prtconf | grep -v not | more

psrinfo -v


That should give you some ideas on the specs of the current machine.

Michael Laajanen

HI,


vasu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
> box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on
> it. It has 512 mb ram. One of the users in the network wants a solaris
> box with better performance for his application, i thought of
> suggesting to upgrade memory from 512mb to 1GB but i really donno how
> to find out about the specs of this existing box. the memory i got to
> know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
> design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
> earliest and proceed with a sales order.
>
> any help in this regard is highly appreciated.
>
> thanks
> vasu.
For EDA stuff like ASIC you should go with a Blade 1500 or 2500,
upgrading a U10 with memory will not gain any performance since you have
alot alot already.

I myself do EDA, both the 1500 and 2500 is great for that so its a
budget issue, if you don't buy many of them then I would pick a 2500
with SCSI drives and XVR 600 graphics, if money is of bnig concern I
would go with a 1500 and XVR600 and 1GB om RAM.

http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CESe...catid =108738


Cheers

Michael

Mark Daniels

waasoo@yahoo.com (vasu) wrote in message news:<4a3246ef.0403170224.6551712b@posting.google. com>...

..... how to find out about the specs of this existing box.....

vasu


prtdiag -v will display both memory and processor info.

Mark

Michael Laajanen

HI,

vasu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
> box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on
> it. It has 512 mb ram. One of the users in the network wants a solaris
> box with better performance for his application, i thought of
> suggesting to upgrade memory from 512mb to 1GB but i really donno how
> to find out about the specs of this existing box. the memory i got to
> know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
> design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
> earliest and proceed with a sales order.
>
> any help in this regard is highly appreciated.

Just a small note regarding memory, to see if memory is a issue.

In a terminal window(shell) on the U10 you can watch the memory usage
when the users are running things on the machine.

% vmstat 1

And you should keep an eye on the 'sr' column, if that field start to
show 10-> all the time you have a need for memory.

You can read about vmstat using % man vmstat



modena $ vmstat 1

Se below for a "idle" machine.

kthr memory page disk faults cpu
r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr dd dd f0 s1 in sy cs
us sy id
0 0 0 3158448 1319696 2 13 11 3 3 0 1 4 1 0 0 475 935 606
7 5 88
0 0 0 3122512 1202064 0 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 437 450 270
3 0 97
0 0 0 3122488 1202048 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 456 312 326
1 3 96



/michael

Peter Sattler

Am 17 Mar 2004 02:24:12 -0800 schrieb vasu <waasoo@yahoo.com>:

> Hi,
>
> I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
> box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on
> it. It has 512 mb ram. One of the users in the network wants a solaris
> box with better performance for his application, i thought of
> suggesting to upgrade memory from 512mb to 1GB but i really donno how
> to find out about the specs of this existing box. the memory i got to
> know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
> design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
> earliest and proceed with a sales order.
>
> any help in this regard is highly appreciated.
>
> thanks
> vasu.

Hi vasu,

I'm with Michael who suggested a real upgrade. With U10 you can upgrade to
1 GB mem, but you are limited to one (not so fast) processor, so if your
user do real stuff take Michaels advice.

If you need more help, please tell us more :

- what will run on the sun, application, database? etc

- how many diskspace

- do you need "higher availability" (mirror the disk)

- do you think you want to upgrade to dual processor ( at least, have the
option to do so)

Cheers

Peter

--
Feel free to ask but don't be disappointed by my answer ...

-----------------------------------------------
Peter Sattler
peter_sattler@web.de

Richard B. Gilbert

vasu wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
>box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on
>it. It has 512 mb ram. One of the users in the network wants a solaris
>box with better performance for his application, i thought of
>suggesting to upgrade memory from 512mb to 1GB but i really donno how
>to find out about the specs of this existing box. the memory i got to
>know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
>design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
>earliest and proceed with a sales order.
>
>any help in this regard is highly appreciated.
>
>thanks
>vasu.
>

Why do you believe that more memory will help? If the machine is
swapping heavily, it might help a little or a lot.
On the other hand, if the user needs more CPU cycles than he can get,
only a faster CPU will help!

FWIW, the Ultra 10 maxes out at 1GB (4x256). CPU clock rates range from
270MHz to 440MHz. It's a nice machine but hardly state-of-the-art any
more! (To see what you have, shut down to the "ok" prompt and type
"banner"; that will report the CPU clock rate)

L0nD0t.$t0we11

Roughly 3/17/04 02:24, vasu's monkeys randomly typed:

> Hi,
>
> I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
> box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on
> it. It has 512 mb ram. One of the users in the network wants a solaris
> box with better performance for his application, i thought of
> suggesting to upgrade memory from 512mb to 1GB but i really donno how
> to find out about the specs of this existing box. the memory i got to
> know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
> design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
> earliest and proceed with a sales order.
>
> any help in this regard is highly appreciated.
>
> thanks
> vasu.

Have you looked at the system while it is running typical or even
worst case application load?

If so, is it running out of free memory, spending time paging,
or worse, swapping?

Since this is solaris 7, you might want to first set priority
paging in /etc/system and reboot. If there is a lot of file
I/O, this will preserve a bit more memory for applications rather
than allowing the I/O to consume it all...

If the app isn't running the system out of memory, does the app
use heavy disk I/O? If so, upgrading to a system with a good
set of SCSI disks [or adding a controller to the U-10] would probably
do more good, particularly if you add a multi-scsi channel controller
and a raid array.

Or you might simply want to get a system with multiple, faster,
processors.

Chris 'Saundo' Saunderson

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 02:24:12 -0800, vasu wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm a windows/intel platform administrator but i also have a solaris
> box in my network. the machine is sun ultrasparc 10 with solaris 7 on
> it. It has 512 mb ram. One of the users in the network wants a solaris
> box with better performance for his application, i thought of
> suggesting to upgrade memory from 512mb to 1GB but i really donno how
> to find out about the specs of this existing box. the memory i got to
> know when i rebooted the machine. our company is mainly into asic
> design and tool testing and support. i really need to decide at the
> earliest and proceed with a sales order.


If you use /usr/platform/sun4u/sbin/prtdiag -v, you'll get a lot of
information about the host.

You really need to dig into what the constraint that the user is finding
really is. It may well be that it isn't memory but disk performance or CPU
constraint. sar, vmstat and iostat (or Glance if you have it) will be
great insight for you.

Saundo
--
Chris "Saundo" Saunderson saundo@earthlink.net
Unix/CCNA/CCDA Guy Powered by Linux and the Orb.

Chris Morgan

"Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88@comcast.net> writes:

> FWIW, the Ultra 10 maxes out at 1GB (4x256). CPU clock rates range
> from 270MHz to 440MHz. It's a nice machine but hardly
> state-of-the-art any more! (To see what you have, shut down to the
> "ok" prompt and type "banner"; that will report the CPU clock rate)

Sorry, but personally I feel Ultra 10 was NEVER state of the art!

When it launched DEC/Compaq was already selling the Compaq XP1000
which would completely blow the doors off any US-IIi workstation.

On the other hand, due to a change of jobs, I went straight from a
60mhz sparc20 running sunos 4 to an Ultra 10 Creator 333/2MB running
Solaris 7, so it certainly felt quite fast by comparison. It all
depends on what you're comparing to.

Chris
--
Chris Morgan
"Post posting of policy changes by the boss will result in
real rule revisions that are irreversible"

- anonymous correspondent

David Combs

In article <8xZ5c.86520$dP1.247422@newsc.telia.net>,
Michael Laajanen <michael.laajanen.no-spam.@telia.com> wrote:
>HI,
>
>
>For EDA stuff like ASIC you should go with a Blade 1500 or 2500,
>upgrading a U10 with memory will not gain any performance since you have
>alot alot already.
>
>I myself do EDA, both the 1500 and 2500 is great for that so its a
>budget issue, if you don't buy many of them then I would pick a 2500
>with SCSI drives and XVR 600 graphics, if money is of bnig concern I
>would go with a 1500 and XVR600 and 1GB om RAM.
>

What's "EDA"?

Thanks,

David

Rich Teer

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, David Combs wrote:

> What's "EDA"?

IIRC, Electronic Design Automation.

--
Rich Teer, SCNA, SCSA

President,
Rite Online Inc.

Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638
URL: http://www.rite-online.net