FME performance on Solaris operating systems

Article Number: 000002047 - Last Modified: Oct 20, 2011

FME has been found to perform poorly on some Solaris platforms. This is possibly a Solaris processor architecture issue.

Symptoms

FME translations run very slowly on Solaris operating systems

Cause

We believe that this is a processor architecture issue with some Solaris hardware. There are two distinct Sun processor architectures:

SPARC T1 processor, i.e. 1Ghz with 8 cores and 32 threads ( 4 per core ) Server : Sunfire T2000, 16GB Memory, 1Ghz SPARC T1 processor
SUNFIRE V490: i.e. 2 x 1.8Ghz processors ( ultrasparc iv+ ) and 16GB Memory

We feel that perhaps the multi- threading architecture of the T1 might be the problem in the case of FME - something interesting on wikpedia.com at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_multithreading

starting at "...Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 (known as "Niagara" ..."

Also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1

"Sharing of the pipeline by multiple threads may make each thread slower, but the overall throughput (and utilization) of each core is much higher."

The T1 also has a poor floating point processor and this may also have been an issue.

FME is not a multi-threaded application and in many cases requires intensive numeric processing - i.e. coordinate system reprojection. This application architecture is not suited to the Sun T1 processor.

We have tested FME on different Sun architectures and here are the results:

Runs the workspace in about 24 hours:
* SunFire T1000
* 1x T1 @ 1.0GHz (6 core, 4 thread/core for 24vCPU)
* 8GB RAM
* 32GB swap space
* 250GB internal Disk storage

Runs the same workspace in about 8 hours:
* SunFire V240 Solaris 10
* 2x UltraSPARC IIIi @ 1.5GHz
* 2GB RAM
* 2GB swap

In the second case the test was on a much older and UltraSPARC but because of the different architecture FME ran faster.