I want to benchmark solaris and linux with java

Question

Can anyone point me out to a project out there that I can download and run it and it would load / stress test itself and then provide me with reports? I want the project to be as big as it can and to involve as many components in java as it can, also i need it free... or to some very good already made results over the web that I can already take a look and get decision. Thanks! main issue to benchmark is which would run it faster / better, solaris or linux

Answer 1

It really depends on the aspects of usage you want to benchmark.

I did this for database applications, in this area TPC could be helpful.

I would recommend google: benchmark java numeric|transaction|rendering|olap

Depending on the characteristics of your use case.

Edit: regarding your comment of a java app running on an applicationserver, check from the backend db server whats the maximal throughput? TPC, then write a multithreaded benchmark client to checkout whats the business logics performance. The last step would be to involve webservers using Apache JMeter. This procedure allows you to tune all relevant parameters from OS over DB-Poolsizes etc.

Answer 2

Linux and Solaris are not much different seen from your perspective, and I do not believe that the benchmark you ask for exists. A much better approach is to take the application you want to run - which hopefully should be platform independent already - and deploy to the architectures you want to test and then attach with jvisualvm and apply your standard test suite.

This will give you quite a good look at the performance without skewing with heavy profiling.

My guess is that for identical configurations you will see that Linux is slightly better than Solaris as the amount of unused memory available for disk caching will strongly influence the performance of the system. Also note that expert system tuning can also make a big difference, but that I believe that you are most interested in the "out of the box" performance.