Running Solaris 10 and Applications on Sun T2000 and T1000 Niagara Servers today requires some manual configurations to achive maximum performance.
At first, you should install the latest Solaris 10 version, this is currently the Solaris 10 8/07 Release.
Check your /etc/system File on your Server for the following entries (Up to Solaris 10, 6/06):
set segkmem_lpsize=0×400000
set pcie:pcie_aer_ce_mask=0×1
set ip:ip_squeue_bind = 0
set ip:ip_squeue_fanout = 1
set ipge:ipge_tx_syncq=1
set ipge:ipge_taskq_disable = 0
set ipge:ipge_tx_ring_size = 2048
set ipge:ipge_srv_fifo_depth = 2048
set ipge:ipge_bcopy_thresh = 512
set ipge:ipge_dvma_thresh = 1
set segkmem_lpsize=0×400000
set consistent_coloring=2
set pcie:pcie_aer_ce_mask=0×1
Apache 2.0 / 2.2 on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000
A good application to run on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers is apache. If you run applications with SSL, you can use 8 on-chip Modular Arithmetic Units (MAU),
one per core inside the UltraSPARC T1 processor. These 8 MAUs extends the processor’s capabilities to act as Hardware Cryptographic SSL Accelerators.
Using the Solaris 10 Cryptographic Framework, it combines thepower of these 8 MAUs, and offers a device (NCP) that can do 14000 raw RSA ops/sec.
You can use the Hardware SSL Accelerator with openssl provided by Solaris 10 in /usr/sfw/bin/openssl and within apache.
There’s a new Sun Blueprint available, which explains how to use the Sun UltraSparc T1 modular aritmic units (MAUs) for hardware SSL acceleration. Ther are examples for Apache, Sun Java System Web Server, Java Applications and the solaris Kernel SSL Proxy (KSSL).
Oracle 10g Database on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000
There’s a whitepaper about running Oracle 10gR2 Database on a Sun T2000 Niagara Server. Summary: When running the Oracle database 10g, the Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads server outperformed an equivalent 4-way Dell PowerEdge server equipped with the latest 64 bit Intel Xeon processors by over 3.5x, while consuming 1.6x less power and occupying 50% of the data center space. It was able to do this while achieving a 3x better price / performance ratio.
MySQL Database on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000
Choose at least MySQL Version 5.x. MySQL 4.x doesn’t scale very good because of locking problems inside MySQL 4.1.
This blog entry is a good starting Point: MySQL InnoDB performance tuning on T2000.
The following articles about mysql on Niagara Servers, are more benchmarks than recommendations. You should have a look at one document from DigiTar and this from zilbo.com.
If you want to read about compiling mysql for Solaris you can look for this Arcticle on SDN. Not only for T2000, also for Solaris 10 on sparc and opteron.
IBM DB2 UDB Database on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000
An arcticle called optimizing IBM DB2 for Solaris 10 1/06 OS on Sun Fire T2000 Server on SDN is what you should read.