SLES9 versus SLES10

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The purpose of these test runs was to compare the Linux® releases SLES9 and SLES10 on the WebSphere® Application Server. The distribution upgrade occurred on both the WebSphere Application Server and the Linux database server.

Figure 1. ETR, ITR, and CPU utilization for the SLES9 versus SLES10 with the DB2® database on Linux test case

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Observations

For the environment with the database on z/OS® the throughput and CPU drops in a proportional manner allowing the costs to remain constant.

Figure 2. ETR, ITR, and CPU utilization for the SLES9 versus SLES10 with the DB2 database on Linux test case

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Observations

The environment with the database on Linux behaves similarly to the z/OS environment. However, the throughput drop is only about half and the CPU utilization stays constant, which leads to increasing cost.

Conclusion

The upgrade to SLES10 leads to increasing cost in our environment. Possible reasons are that SLES10 starts more daemons, maybe the new udev layer (replacement for devfs) has some impact here (might be verified by using cio_ignore), or the network performance with SLES10 is slightly worse.