Sparc seems very slow

Hello,

I´ve got a Sparc E250 server and I´m runing Debian GNU/Linux on it.
I now started to make some performance comparisons against a default PC.
Here are the configurations I used:

E250:
~> cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu : TI UltraSparc II (BlackBird)
fpu : UltraSparc II integrated FPU
promlib : Version 3 Revision 16
prom : 3.16.1
type : sun4u
ncpus probed : 2
ncpus active : 2
Cpu0Bogo : 799.53
Cpu1Bogo : 799.53
MMU Type : Spitfire
State:
CPU0: online
CPU1: online

2 GB RAM
4x36 GB SCSI

~> uname -a
Linux bse 2.2.18pre21 #1 SMP Tue Dec 19 22:53:19 CET 2000 sparc64 unknown

~> dpkg --status postgresql
Package: postgresql
Maintainer: Oliver Elphick <Oliver(dot)Elphick(at)lfix(dot)co(dot)uk>
Version: 7.1.2-4

PC:
~> cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 795.576
cache size : 256 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1589.24

256 MB RAM
20 GB IDE

~> uname -a
Linux wr-linux02 2.4.5 #1 Mit Mai 30 08:24:06 CEST 2001 i686 unknown

~> dpkg --status postgresql
Package: postgresql
Maintainer: Oliver Elphick <Oliver(dot)Elphick(at)lfix(dot)co(dot)uk>
Version: 7.1.2-1

At first I created a set of tables and indexes using

~> date; cat ifsg.pgsql | psql ifsg; date

where
~> grep "CREATE *TABLE" ifsg.pgsql | wc -l
40
~> grep "CREATE *INDEX" ifsg.pgsql | wc -l
117

E250:
Fre Aug 17 13:40:03 CEST 2001
Fre Aug 17 13:40:14 CEST 2001

PC:
Don Aug 16 14:15:24 CEST 2001
Don Aug 16 14:15:28 CEST 2001

so the PC is about more 2 times faster. (By the way postgresql 7.0.2 took
24 seconds on this machine for this job.)
Next I started inserting some amount of data:

~> ls -l T000001_010000.TXT
-rw-r--r-- 1 tillea admin 19196240 15. Aug 13:42 T000001_010000.TXT
~> grep -i "INSERT" T000001_010000.TXT | wc -l
63481
~> date; cat T000001_010000.TXT | psql ifsg; date

E250:
Fre Aug 17 13:41:42 CEST 2001
Fre Aug 17 13:57:52 CEST 2001
(version 7.0.2 took 1 hour for this task)

PC:
Don Aug 16 15:23:34 CEST 2001
Don Aug 16 15:24:51 CEST 2001

The question is: Is there any reason for the fact that the PC is nearly ten
times faster for the same task? By the way, I´m using identical
/etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf and /etc/postgresql/postgresql.conf for both
boxes.

The only difference I can see are different Linux kernel versions (perhaps
2.4 series has better drivers to speed up disk access) but I wanted to
stay tuned before upgrading to 2.4 for production machines. Has anybody
experiences using Solaris in a comparable machine?

Kind regards

Andreas.