Hi everybody,

bad images have the tendency to keep hanging around long after they have become 
invalid. Solaris once was really slow in many areas, but has dramatically 
improved in the past years. But its image of being slow is still present in the 
head of many people. Most of these people might be willing to revalidate their 
opinion if one tells them that their image has become obsolete. But these 
revalidation efforts will be stopped immediately, if the old impression seems 
to come up again.

Concerning Solaris I have been thinking about what the major issues might be 
that keep up Solaris' image of being slow. If one evaluates Solaris in general 
(not for a very specific purpose), one won't start with top features like 
live-upgrade, dtrace, and so on. Additionally, one won't setup a system with 
many processors and demanding applications. So IMO the very first steps someone 
makes are very important, because the first impressions must be very 
_convincing_, to assure people that a further investigation is worth the effort.

So I thought about in what parts of Solaris the Slowaris image is still valid. 
Especially, where does the system give a bad impression that might be valid, 
but is not applicable to Solaris in general. I have come up with the following 
points:
- default DVD based install process (slow)
- default patch process (very slow, see my comment in the performance 
discussion)
- USB performance (very slow, I raised an RFE some time ago)
- SMC (slow and very limited), webmin disabled by default
- default setup (PATH, shell, missing alternative security profiles)
- missing option to setup a sample user during install

Don't get me wrong: ZFS, DTrace, and the like are really great, but in my 
experience many people won't give Solaris a try long enough to get to these 
sweet spots, and that's sad.

Any comments or thoughts?

Cheers,
Tom
 
 
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