My Sun T2000 is here, and with Cliff’s help it’s now patched, configured, and online. (Aside: what’s a Sun Happy Meal?)

I’ll second Jon’s assessment that Sun really should put some reasonable cable adapters in the box, as the the bundle of adapters necessary to make a null modem connection to the box is ridiculously out of scale (I’ll get a picture soon).

I’m getting the application environment put together, which has turned out easier than expected thanks to the convenient packages from Blastwave.org. The box came with Solaris 10 installed, and after a quick installation and configuration of pkg-get I was happily installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP as simply as typing pkg-get -i apache.

AMP, AMPS, Apache, Blastwave.org, LAMP, MySQL, PHP, Solaris, Solaris 10, Sun, Sun Microsystems, T2000

A Solaris sysadmin I’m not. But now that I’ve finally got the Sun T2000 server I begged for a while back, I’ve got to ramp it up right quick.

The first task is to get a, um, LAMP environment up and running (SAMP?…oh, Sun wants us to call it AMPS). A bit of Googling turned up this forum thread that suggested Blastwave.org’s ports of PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

edit: I corrected the model number.

amp, amps, apache, lamp, mysql, open source, oss, php, solaris, sun, t2000

A couple notes from the past few days of tweaks and fixes:

• Hyper-threading has a huge effect on LAMP performance.
   
• From now on, I’ll have bad dreams about running MySQL without Query Caching in the way that I used to have nightmares about going to school wearing only my underwear. The difference is that big.
   
• WordPress rocks, but it has some queries that will kill large databases. I’m playing with baseline when I fix ‘em, but it’s worth it.
   
• Being highly ranked for searches related to bears and bear lovers on the weekend that Grizzly Man airs on TV is both good and bad: it doubled my previous high for daily page-loads, but killed my server and taught me some lessons about sloppy coding.
   
• The support techs are Lunarpages continue to pretty much rock.
   
• Having friends who cut their teeth on high-performance PHP/MySQL and are willing to spend the night workshopping it with you is indispensable.
   
• It’s hard to beat the calming beauty of driving home through a snowfall on back roads at 2 AM carried by your life’s soundtrack.
   

lamp, mysql, php, server optimization, mysql optimization, server performance, hyperthreading, performance optimization