AnandTech Exclusive: Sun's sub-$1000 SunFire X2100 Server

Compiling

We expect our X2100 to take the largest hit in performance here, during the compiling tests. Our previous analyses have shown that hard drives are often the bottleneck on heavy compiles. Our Aquarius uses SATA rather than SCSI, a performance hit for any server doing heavy compilations. Then again, the Aquarius also has a lighter core logic when compared to other systems that we've looked at in the past, as well as faster unbuffered memory.

GNU Make 3.79.1 / GCC 3.4.2

While GCC isn't multithreaded, we can run multiple jobs using the -j command in make. Below, you can see the significant improvement on performance going from 1 to 3 jobs. We used the commands as below to compile the Linux 2.6.4 kernel from kernel.org:

# yes "" | make config
# time make -jX

We also threw in some compile tests of entire GCC base, which take significantly longer than the Linux kernel to compile.

Even though our compile tests were a little better than what we originally expected them to be, also consider the fact that we swapped the older Seagate 7200.7 hard drive featured in the shipped unit for a Seagate 7200.8. The differences between the drives are minor, but the 7200.8 does have a slightly faster seek, which could explain for the better-than-expected results.