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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Switching to Linux in 2000 for something as busy as Amazon.com was a really ballsy move. I remember fighting kernel panics and hangs under load on RH7 - java workloads. This was pre RMAP VM and I vaguely remember the JVM was able to trigger Linux VM scalability issues due large number of anonymous page mappings.

For all the money they were charging Sun did really put lot of engineering effort into Solaris and SPARC.

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We (the Linux kernel community) put a lot of work into scalability back then. One time we delayed a Red Hat release several weeks due to a persistent bit flip on an NFS filesystem on one of our stress tests that we thought was a kernel bug. It ultimately turned out to be a broken Cisco switch that was happily fixing up the CRC and checksums on the NFS packets it was bit flipping.

Of course. Sun was ahead of the curve in OS scalability and SMP hardware departments and for some time Solaris was still the best OS to run databases and Java.

Sun also made some pretty awesome x86 servers. It's sad that so many of the vendors left standing today have such crappy IPMI implementations.

I used to work at a shop that had hundreds of X4100's running x86 Solaris 10. It was a pleasure to work those hosts. Solaris had some really cool stuff like ZFS, dtrace, Zones/Containers, SMF, etc.

And now you read the release notes with dread as you witness more and more functionality being dropped because they choose not to maintain it. Luckily there is FreeBSD

Yeah it’s a shame. If Sun would have made Solaris (both SPARC/x86) free sooner, they might have prevented the mass exodus of companies moving off to save money.

In retrospect, they should have gone down the Sun386I path back in the day, instead of changing gears and spending $$$ building up the SPARC architecture and ecosystem.

The SPARCcenter 2000 had 20 sockets in 1992:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun4d#SPARCcenter_2000

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation

The Cray CS6400 had 64 in 1993:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_CS6400

SunOS 4.1.4 was released in 1994 and SunOS 5.x ("Solaris 2") started in 1992.

The Sparc2k was a beast. I got on in 1998 that (among other tasks) ran the IRC bot for our channel with a 4gb text quotes database to chain off of. ("Shut up, lucy"). It usually ran at a load average of 4 to 12 per CPU. I had just over 1TB of disk array on it; in 4 dozen, full height, 5 inch 23GB SCSI drives.

I sank about $10k into that system in ebay parts. at the time there just wasn't any way to get such bandwidth out of x86, but used gear was cheap. if you could afford the time, sweat and blood to keep it running.

I remember reading Sun’s financial statements at the time and bragging about huge 50% margins and thinking that can’t last. In some alternate timeline, Sun would’ve lowered their prices, stayed in the game, and we’d all have rock solid Sparc laptops by now.

Yeah, no way to survive in the computing game very long with super high margins.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/profit-...

What about Apple?

Sun didn't have Jobs's Reality Distortion Field technology. It can't work otherwise.

Oh but Sun did. It’s what made them rich and it wasn’t pretty.

“We’re the dot in dotcom.“

Well, they ended up as the .loser instead.

Sun: "We put the dot into dot-com!"

Microsoft: "Oh yeah? Well we put the COM into dot-com. Pthththth!"

IBM: ”When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots. Badoom psssh!”

https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computin...

That was Cisco slogan.

No it wasn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njnNVV5QNaA

That was terrible.

Thanks for the LOLs.

I remember looking at the invoice for a SPARCStation 20 and thinking, you know, it's a little better than a $2,000 PC, but it's not 10 times better.

If you read the other DE respond in the tweets, it was DEC/Compaq Alphas. I think it's kind of insane to have gone from 64b back to 32b (and the DE claims it caused big issues). Seems like API alphas running Linux would have been a better play until Opteron made it clear amd64 had a lot of runway.

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