[rescue] New Sparc5 170 Rescue Questions

[James]

>    Excuse the stoopid question, but does the CPU make this feel like a 
> peppier
>system, or is "enough RAM" the big deal?
>    I have an SS10 and an SS20 on which I installed Solaris 2.6 because I
>didn't think that 8 would provide a (*cough*) "satisfactory user experience."
>If each has about 100 MB of real RAM, would 8 run all right on the SS10 for
>use as a secondary workstation?
>-wde

The answer is, yes.

The SS5 CPU upgrade made a big difference, but the dram is a big issue 
also. Disk thrashing and paging is a big drain on resources. Any system 
will benefit from 128M+ dram. Both of my Sun desk-tops have 256M and I like 
that number. My Linux box at work has 1G dram, but I suspect that I never 
really use it even though that box has to work for a living (my Windows 
machine is for web browsing and MS Office).

As for Sol8, if you've got the dram to run v8 it is supposed to be faster 
than the previous versions. I found Sol8 ran a little better on my SS5 than 
Sol7 did. I'm not sure of the requirements for Sol8, but I bet ~128M would 
do it. I've never run it on less than 256M so I can't provide first-hand 
impressions. Also, the SS10 and SS20 are SMP. I would expect that Sol8 
would take nice advantage of two CPU's.