Disk I/O as a bottleneck? [OT]

[is123 at zahav.net.il]

On Sun, 08 May 2011 19:19:25 +0300
guy keren <choo at actcom.co.il> wrote:

> and how is all this related to solaris Vs. linux? solaris is *nix, at
> least was the last time i heard ;)

Yes, you are right, but for some reason Solaris has the reputation for
handling multicore better than Linux and BSD. Maybe you guys know why, it's
not my area. I do use it and it has plusses and minuses like any other OS.
I don't have a monster box to run it on yet so I can't confirm what I have
been reading for the past few years.

> care to tell us the name of this operting system you are working on,
> instead of sounding so mysterious? is it a commercial general-purpose
> operating system? if so - what is it's name? or is it a proprietary
> system of the company you work for that does not work as a
> general-purpose operating system?
> 
> when you say "system Z" - do you refer to what IBM formerly called
> "MVS"?

Sorry this is going off topic, but just to answer your question ;-)

Yes, no mystery...it's z/OS on z/Architecture (hardware platform). It's a
very tightly coupled OS/platform that has been evolving since the 1960s.
Extremely nice software/hardware environment to work with. It's a general
purpose computing platform that is designed specifically around high
throughput and RAS and has many design features in the OS and subsystems to
make sure applications can't bang each other on the head too badly and
can't do anything to system code at all. For example in the OLTP systems
you can set various timers in the tuning parameters so that any deadlock or
resource contention will be resolved by killing the offending party or
waiter after the prescribed interval expires. It's granular and not an
all-in-one setting. You can also set timers for elapsed or CPU time
consumption by various work classes and kill runaway jobs, change their
priority, etc.

Anybody who wants to talk about it email me anytime.