How does Splunk indexer perform on a Sparc T5 machine

[FritzWittwer_ol]

Old Sparc HW, specially the T1,T2 and T4 CPUs is known to be not well suited for Splunk as it has a rather poor single thread performance. Anyhow, has anybody experience how Splunk run on a recent Sparc T5 System, e.g. a T5-2 with
- two 16 Core CPUs @ 3.6 GHz -> total 32 cores and 256 threads
- 256 GB RAM
- two 4 GB Fiber Channel interfaces to fast SAN Storage

Single request should not be a problem anymore, and the system would allow for a lot of parallel requests. In our experience a Sparc T5 has a similar performance / price relation as an X86 System, but it leads to lesser, bigger, systems and thus saves the burden of maintaining more systems.

[jrodman]

Sadly, there is no Sparc hardware on the market with good single thread performance. Sparc core design stagnated in the 2000s, and while clock speeds have raised, per-clock peformance on Sparc cpus is an order of magnitude inferior to modern AMD and Intel chips.

Since it is common scenario to run CPU-bound searches on Splunk that will be single-threaded in their criticial paths, and users will expect prompt answers, there is no reason to choose Sparc for splunk indexing or search tasks.