A recent analysis reports that several Alfresco installations have had performance issues using SUN T2000 infrastructure environment. The conclusion and recommendation of this analysis is to use UltraSPARC Vx, Intel or AMD processors infrastructure instead.

T2000 and T5000 are from the same family. The T2000 has been designed for being highly performant in the treatment of parallel tasks but its processor (UltraSPARC T1) is very slow, especially for treating sequential tasks.

Alfresco uses the Apache Lucene search engine – release 2.1.0 – and the update of indexes treatments are not performed as parallel tasks. The indexing process is highly sequential and requires huge CPU resources.

T5000 (UltraSPARC T2) processors are similar to the T2000 and will have the same performance issues when handling bunches of sequential activities. Alfresco indexing process does not fully benefit from the capabilities of the T2000/T5000 infrastructure, it rather points out and suffers for the weaknesses of the T2000 processors family; in concrete facts this means that an indexing activity (like a full reindexation) that should take hours can take days – and this is unfortunately what has been observed in some live sites. The Alfresco Development Team is aware of that and is working on it.

For Customers that have SUN infrastructure and wants to keep Alfresco on it, the recommendation is to go for SUN Fire X4250 / SUN Netra X4450 (Intel processors). Alternatively, if UltraSPARC processor is a need, the V490/V890 is a good match.