[SunRescue] best OS for a SMP SS10

[Dave McGuire]

On May 21, James Lockwood wrote:
> >   I'm not really *recommending* it, but when the alternatives are things
> > like 1) slowing the otherwise reasonably fast machine down with
> > Solaris and 2) losing the second processor with something fast like
> 
> I'd like to hear some hard data on why you feel Solaris is slower on this
> hardware than SunOS 4.  To be sure, it takes longer to boot and has a

  Uhhhhh...evaluating it on SS5/SS20 hardware in primarily web-server
applications, and loading them up until they stop working.  SunOS4 was
far and away the superior performer.  The tests didn't last long,
though, I'll admit...when we found out how buggy the C libs were (the
memory leaks I flamed about the other day) I dumped it like a bad
habit.  You see, some of us have binaries that run for more than a few
hours at a time. =)

> larger memory footprint, but memory management and syscall performance has
> in most cases been dramatically improved.  IO intensive apps I ran on
> similar hardware universally showed an improvement when moving to Solaris,
> and this was back in the 2.4 days!

  Well my experience was in the 2.4/2.5 days as well, and I had exactly
the opposite results.  It was slower than pissing tar, and not
reliable enough to even make it into the machine room.  It wasn't any
better, it wasn't any faster (on MY raised floor, anyway) and it was
buggy as hell.

  And it STILL (as of 7, anyway) doesn't ship with a usable tar(1).
*grumble*

  Of course, if you have a SysV guru sitting there to fix all the bugs
and tune it to perfection, you might give my BSD-guru-fixed-and-tuned
SunOS4 systems a run for their money...but out-of-the-box, not a chance.

  Now I'll be the first to admit that Solaris has come a long way...as I
stated a few days ago, this long-time Slowlaris hater is in the
process of making his rent money depend on Solaris...but I definitely
sense a certain knee-jerk reaction around here lately to defend
solaris all the way back to it's nigh-unusable 2.x (where x <= 4) days
whenever anyone has anything less than glowing and gushing to say
about it.

> Note that I'm not referring to most of the bundled UI goo that comes along
> with Solaris (CDE) as to get reasonable performance and a level playing
> field you'd want to compile MIT/TOG X11 from scratch anyway.

  CDE is basically unusable on anything sub-Ultra in my opinion...

            -Dave McGuire