Opensolaris at Smugmug

Don MacAskill (the CEO of SmugMug - yeah CEO and geekdom isn´t mutually exclusive) did an interesting experiment - he used an Opensolaris system for one of his database replicas. And his experiences were really positive (besides of the usual pet peeve we already working on ;) ):

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and it’s been awful for at least 8 years. As a result, we’ve put our first OpenSolaris box into production at SmugMug and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the performance

The configuration has a really interesting speciality. He used compression.

Lo and behold, it worked! We’re getting a 2.12X compression ratio on our DB, and performance is keeping up just fine. I ran some quick performance tests on large linear reads/writes and we were measuring 45.6MB/s sustained uncompression and 39MB/s sustained compression on a single-threaded app on an Opteron CPU.