I'm not surprised. Early Sparc chips weren't much to write home about. I had a Sparc 10 at home for a while. It made a great X11 desktop. The later UltraSparc systems, like the Enterprise series, were powerful, supported tons of CPUs, memory, and IO but single threaded CPU performance still wasn't stellar.
At one startup, we had like 10 people logged in to a E3500 for Java builds. The thing had 512 megs of RAM, huge for the time, but with 10 people compiling and running java apps with a min heap of 64 megs, you got into swap pretty quick. It had these enormous disk arrays attached. I think it was 2x Sun Storage arrays with 16 disks each, each one being like 20 gigs or something, for a total of 640 gigs before the RAID. We were also running a database instance on the single box (Sybase, I think), which didn't help. A lot of people started running their apps on their Windows desktops.
This was pretty early, late 98 or early 99. We basically had built our own app server on top of Apache JServ, which predated Tomcat.
At one startup, we had like 10 people logged in to a E3500 for Java builds. The thing had 512 megs of RAM, huge for the time, but with 10 people compiling and running java apps with a min heap of 64 megs, you got into swap pretty quick. It had these enormous disk arrays attached. I think it was 2x Sun Storage arrays with 16 disks each, each one being like 20 gigs or something, for a total of 640 gigs before the RAID. We were also running a database instance on the single box (Sybase, I think), which didn't help. A lot of people started running their apps on their Windows desktops.
This was pretty early, late 98 or early 99. We basically had built our own app server on top of Apache JServ, which predated Tomcat.