Probably I just missed them all, but I did a fair amount of searching trying to find other users reviewing the ArcGIS 9.3 unix port, trying to decide if I should run ArcGIS on unix or Windows.<\/p>\n
Well, I’m here to say, stick with windows. The unix port uses enormously more CPU to achive the same goals. It’s built on a porting platform called MainWin, which seems to have been written to allow porting developers to avoid having to do too much work when porting a product from one OS to another, but doesn’t seem to have given much thought to, for example, efficiency. I would guess that ArcGIS on Unix uses about 5 times the CPU – and GIS is usually pretty CPU-intensive, so this is a Very Bad Thing.<\/p>\n
Also, a lot of functionality that works well on windows, such as starting and stopping services, deleting services, etc, works poorly or not at all on unix. ( caveat: I didn’t try installing the patch, and I didn’t try 9.3.1 – this may have all been fixed).<\/p>\n
The unix port also definately has a ‘we didn’t feel like actually porting the application’ feel to it – processes show up with names like ‘dllrunner {hex-guid}’ and ‘arcsoc.exe’. While it’s sort of amusing watching the opposite of Cygwin happen, it doesn’t give one warm and fuzzy feelings that a lot of effort was put into taking advantage of the operating system’s native strengths.<\/p>\n
The unix port also seems to have reletively bad process isolation. When one process is off generating cache tiles, other completely unrelated services will become unusable.<\/p>\n
I do give ESRI props that they bothered to try and make a unix port. I just wish they had done it in the traditional way of actually porting the code \/ writing support libraries for unix to replace any key windows-OS functionality, instead of by slapping it in a win32-replacement framework and calling it a day.<\/p>\n
On the *good* side – migrating the services from a unix server to a windows one took very little time, and was smooth and painless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Probably I just missed them all, but I did a fair amount of searching trying to find other users reviewing the ArcGIS 9.3 unix port, trying to decide if I should run ArcGIS on unix or Windows. Well, I’m here to say, stick with windows. The unix port uses enormously more CPU to achive the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}