I just got an older Dell Poweredge 2200 which I plan to use as an NFS/Samba server. It's a PII 333, 128 Mb RAM and has a 9 Gb SCSI disk. Which OS, RedHat 7 or Solaris 8 x86, will perform better, or is there a noticeable difference? I don't plan to run xdm or any unnecessary services. Would I be better off adding a small IDE drive for the root disk and use the SCSI for shared files and /tmp?
Linux will generally outperform Solaris in many CPU related benchmarks, all other things equal. Not sure about network interface performance. Networking performance has always been a weaker area in Linux. Regardless, both will work just fine.
Normally there are other concerns more important than raw hardware performance, including: training, existing skill sets, requirements for commercial support and other corporate factors. The ultimate decision should take into consideration the human, support and sustainability factors and weigh them appropriately.
[Edited by Neo on 04-18-2001 at 08:03 PM]