one time we had something going ... wrong. took forever to login and the first person on entered 'uptime' and the load average was in the thousands. nothing was failing. just taking a really really long time to complete.

That's what I remember my sys admin friends saying. The Sun machines could handle heavy loads without falling over. But if you were running a heavy single user application or compiling a big project a commodity wintel box was faster.

definitely. my company was paid a buncha cash by MS to convert our web infrastructure to Windows NT. We had to have roughly 8x the number of boxes. 4x to handle the load and double that because they had to be rebooted all the damn time to keep them serving.

> Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working […]

And under high load.

I've had Linux live lock on more than one occasion when load averages hit >100. I've never a Solaris (or FreeBSD) system live lock even under ridiculous loads (200+), and was always been able to login and kill whatever process(es) went sideways.

I once ran into an issue on a GNU Mailman host putting out an email storm and the load average was > 800 on an x86 Solaris box that probably only had 4x AMD cores. I was eventually able to get in as root on the serial console and fix it. Back in those days it was almost shameful to just reboot something vs. slogging through and trying to fix it. Also I miss not having to deal with OOM issues.