>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 o f 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.
The funny thing is that the term "Slowaris" was coined by Sun users when Solaris was first released; it contrasted to SunOS 4.x which was faster in a number of things, and certainly more lightweight, especially when running Suntools and not X windows. Linux users really have no right to use that term :-) >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 as >ystem with many processors and demanding applications. So IMO the very >first steps someone makes ar e very important, because the first >impressions must be very _convincing_, to assure people that a further >investigation is worth the effort. That is important and that why whenever people find Solaris measurably slower than any of the competition, we think it's a bug (except in cases where standards complaince is an issue) >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 gener al. 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) Yes. Install is very bad; we know that we need to fix that. >- USB performance (very slow, I raised an RFE some time ago) I see no issue there; what is the RFE? >- 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 w on't give Solaris a try long enough to get >to these sweet spots, and that's sad. There is a project which tries to address a number of those first user experiences; while install slowness isn't directly a part of that project, it still rates high. Casper _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
