Gzip and compress slow on T6320

Question

So far testing has shown that gzip and compress run 2-3 times slower on the new blades as on the older V-440s.
Mkfile, Tar, unzip, rm –rf, and Copy run at about the same speed.
I have eliminated LDOMs, RAM, swap, and local hard drives as issues (by putting SWAP and the target directory on SAN, and running in single user mode).
Dusting off my performance tuning hat - been a long time - any hints as to where to look would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Further research found that the problem is with the Niagra chip - for single threaded processes it is "less efficient" than the older SPARC chips (it blows). For most applications that use a large number of small threads these chips rock (pun intended) - BUT for large single thread jobs (like gzip or compress) the processor is just not as fast. Sun recommends checking Oracle jobs for large sequential queries, and breaking these into many smaller queries.
Experience so far has been that 4 threads on the T6320 can match 2 CPUs on a F-280 for our Oracle instances, the only problem has been with the backups, where a large number of files are gzip'd. With 64 threads available we will increase the number of threads during the backup window - or - be more patient.
gzip version was not considered since the performance issue arises with compress also.