Re: Lilypond on Sparc

[Russ Ross]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 17:39:49 -0400, Julian Squires <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 08:44:01PM +0200, address@hidden wrote:
> > I just found that a Sun Sparc is, as second hand not expensive at all
> > (well, that is a matter of "taste") but I have no idea, what models are
> > confortable enough specially to get a fast execution of lily (I am
> > actually running Athlon 2 Ghz with Suse 9.0)
> >
> > Who can help with own experience?
> > Does Solaris accept rpms?
> 
> You can run debian on sparc machines pretty nicely, and just apt-get
> install lilypond.  I have a bunch of sparc-based machines, but I do all
> my lilypond work on a powerpc machine, so I can't say too much about
> speed, except that you probably want an ultra 2 as an absolute bare
> minimum; you probably want a modern machine like a blade 150 or better
> for real work.  Sun machines are great for multiuser work (amazing for
> many interactive sessions for example), but their speed may not impress
> you for single user work.  Linux tends to be a bit faster than Solaris
> on older sparc machines, can't vouch for the newer ones.

I've been away from Sparc machines for a year or two now, but I'd like
to echo Julian's comments.  The strength of the Sparc machines is in
their scalability, not in their speed.  In other words, they are much
better than a Pentium-based machine if you want 32 processors and many
gigabytes of memory, but for a basic single-processor machine you'll
probably find that a normal PC is much faster.

At my last job, we had some really long running jobs that took a
couple days to complete.  We used our flashy Sparc machine, which was
very expensive when we bought it two years earlier.  It was a single
processor machine but we were all mesmerized by the Sun and Solaris
names.  The jobs were taking too long to run, however, so in the end
we bought a consumer PC from Costco at less than 1/5 what the Sparc
machine had cost us, and it ran the job 17 times faster.  Normal PCs
are cheap and fast, and a couple-years-old Sparc machine probably
can't compete with a cheap, modern PC.  If you don't already know how
a Sparc machine will help you, then chances are it won't.

- Russ