[SunRescue] SPARCstation 2

[Ido Dubrawsky]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > 
> [snip]
> > 
> > I'm running Solaris 7 on my SPARCstation 2 without any 
> > problems.  In fact, it
> > runs a bit better than Solaris 2.6 did.  It all depends on the tuning.
> > 
> > Ido
> > 
> > --
> > Ido Dubrawsky
> > Sr. UNIX System Administrator
> 
> You see that line there?  As much as we all wish we were, not everybody who
> mucks around with this stuff is a senior unix administrator...yet.  What
> kind of tuning did you to to get it to run better?  
> 	Greg
> 
Greg,

  I meant no disrespect with the claim that Solaris 7 is running better on
my SPARCstation 2 than 2.6 was.  As to what I did to improve performance,
I'll look in my notes and try to provide as much of a breakdown as possible.
First off: max out the memory (I'm running 96MB of memory and am trying to find
the other 32MB memory card for the SBUS memory expansion...anyone have them?).
Second, I'm using an IBM 7200 RPM 4.3GB drive (I don't remember the exact
model, I'll have to look that one up).  Third thing I can remember off the top
of my head, is be sure to add: set priority_paging=1 in /etc/system and reboot.
Although Solaris 7 has a new paging algorithm which is much more efficient than
the one in Solaris 2.6 (or 2.5.1) for that matter, too many times have I seen
a system loaded with Solaris 7, yet without that one line in /etc/system, the
new paging algorithm is not used.  In their white paper on the subject, Sun
mentions this fact, but most sys admins I've seen think that if they simple 
install Solaris 7 on their hardware that automagically uses the new algorithm.
Anyway, those are the three things off the top of my head.  As soon as I find
my notes for my SPARC 2, I'll distill them down for you.  Now, my SPARC 2 
hardly works anywhere near as fast as my Dell Pentium III (550MHz) box running
Solaris 7 at work, but there are things that can be done to improve performance.
I highly recommend reading Adrian Cockroft's book "Sun Performance and Tuning,
Java and the Internet (2nd ed.)"  It's some really good stuff...

Well...back to trying to get my 2 year old son down for a nap...

Ido

--
Ido Dubrawsky
Sr. UNIX System Administrator                   E-mail: ido at globeset.com
Command and Control Group/Application Services
GlobeSET.com
Austin, TX