Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times.
We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
> Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks
It certainly was from 2011 to 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer
> obviously you need to write your own software
Kerberos ran fine for me on cast-off SPARCstation 10(?) which was well obsolete at the time.
we used to 'joke' that you would have to set one of fire to get it to stop responding to a ping. even then, might take a while.
My recollection is anyone doing massive concurrency per server (at the time over 10k connections) was moving to using a BSD because of kqueue.
We even went through a phase of email on OpenBSD before being bought by a company that insisted on Exchange.
Linux didn’t seem to pull decisively ahead of the BSDs until multicore x86 became mainstream. Up until then it always seemed flaky.