Oracle Performance On Different Platforms

I have several Oracle databases running on older Sun servers which I will have to upgrade to new hardware in the near future. I haven't decided yet whether to stay with the Sun/Solaris platform or to make the move to Linux. The decisive factor in this case will have to be price and performance.

Does anyone have information about performance of Oracle servers on Sun-Sparc/Solaris 64-bit as compared to Intel-Xeon/Linux 32 bit? How do they both perform in multi-user environment?

I would very much appreciate a wise word of advice.

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I prefer Solaris, mostly because I have found it to be remarkably stable. Linux is fairly stable, but I pretty quickly found ways to make it crash. On the other hand, you can expect the Linux community to be more responsive than a big, monolithic behemoth of a HW/SW/OS vendor who tends to hew more to their OWN agenda than their USERS' needs.
While Sun might not release driver updates to support the latest widget available for the x86 platform, someone might be developing it for Linux at the same time that you are looking for it.

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Anytime you run an OS on a stable Hardware platform such as the Sun Computers, the system will be stable. PCs are inherently non-stable platforms. Linux seems to be changing rapidly to keep up with PC changes. Linux is similar enough to Solaris in lay out and stucture to be easy to work with. I support Solaris systems at work and I just recently built a Linux box at home. I love the configurability of UNIX. Linux is cheap and Solaris is expensive.

Make you own decision based on your needs. Good Luck.

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How I do enjoy the unix techie sense of humor. I use both Solaris 7 x86 and Linux kernel 2.2.13. They both work reasonably well. Of course I also use BeOS 4.5.2, Windows NT (not very often though), and am thinking about FreeBSD. I have an affinity for operating systems that I can't quite explain. I am always interested in seeing how the features are implemented among the different systems.

For a stable platform without any thrills that won't be changing much Solaris is the way to go especially if you expect to be running any mission critical stuff on it. For example we would not even consider running our database servers that track the history of all our legal cases on a Linux box. It would be much to risky and the equivalent of playing with a cigarette lighter while waist deep in napalm. However, the personal workstation in my office runs primarily linux which I find to be stable enough and provides much better hardware support than Solaris x86. Relative to Solaris x86 Linux supports an etraordinary number of hardware periphereals.