Thanks a million to everyone who responded. I received a lots of very useful
tips.
Eventually I worked around the problem by changing my perl script. However
the issue is still there.
Why, the same perl script that accessing the SAME data runs 5-6 times slower
on Intel box than on E250?
Is it some kind of hardware limitation problem on Intel side or may be there
is a certain settings within Solaris 8x86 that
needs to be changed in order to improve system performance in my particular
case?
Please see sys specs and 'truss' output below.

Intel System
OS : Solaris 8x86
CPU: P4 2GHz
RAM: 1GB RAM
HD : 36GB 10K RPM SCSI

E250
OS : Solaris 2.6
CPU : Dual 300Mhz
RAM : 1GB
HD : 18GB 10K RPM SCSI

truss output on 250:
syscall seconds calls errors
_exit .00 1
read .56 11342
write .35 5651
open .00 10 1
close .13 5682
chdir .00 1
time .00 1
brk .02 94
stat .00 1
getpid .00 1
getuid .00 2
fstat .00 8
getgid .00 2
ioctl .10 5673 5672
execve .00 1
fcntl .15 5662
sigaction .00 1
context .00 43
mmap .00 25
mprotect .00 2
munmap .00 8
memcntl .00 6
llseek .10 5673
getdents64 .01 207
stat64 .51 6803 1138
lstat64 .27 6765
fstat64 .27 11333
open64 .49 5684 11
---- --- ---
sys totals: 2.96 70682 6822
usr time: 16.62
elapsed: 51.78

truss output on Intel system:
yscall seconds calls errors
_exit .00 1
read .79 11342
write .17 5651
open .00 8 1
close .15 5680
chdir .00 1
time .00 1
brk .00 95
getpid .00 1
getuid .00 2
getgid .00 2
sysi86 .00 1
ioctl .11 5673 5672
execve .00 1
fcntl .03 5662
sigaction .00 1
context .00 42
mmap .00 23
mprotect .00 2
munmap .00 8
fxstat .00 7
memcntl .00 6
sysconfig .00 2
llseek .16 5674
resolvepath .00 1
getdents64 .03 209
stat64 1.96 6852 1189
lstat64 .13 6820
fstat64 .31 11333
open64 1.09 5684 11
------- ------ ----
sys totals: 4.93 70785 6873
usr time: 3.69
elapsed: 201.70

Original Posting

Hello Gurus,> I have a perl script, which is doing 3 things.
> 1. get all the listing of a directory, using the Perl function: glob (*);
> 2. for each name we got in the step 1, check for existence of a file,
using> the Perl function, -f $fileName
> 3. for each name we got in the step 1, read a properties file. (file size
is> < 1.5k)
>
> I am running this script on a directory with 6500 entries.
> It takes 25 seconds to complete this script on E250 dual 300/1GB RAM
Solaris> 2.6 and 5 minutes on Intel P4 2Ghz/1GB RAM Solaris 8x86.
> Hard Drive speed is the same on both systems.
> Any ideas why it's so slow on x86 system?