Switching to Linux in 2000 for something as busy as Amazon.com was a really ballsy move. I remember fighting kernel panics and hangs under load on RH7 - java workloads. This was pre RMAP VM and I vaguely remember the JVM was able to trigger Linux VM scalability issues due large number of anonymous page mappings.
For all the money they were charging Sun did really put lot of engineering effort into Solaris and SPARC.
For all the money they were charging Sun did really put lot of engineering effort into Solaris and SPARC.