[SunRescue] best OS for a SMP SS10

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 21 May 2001, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   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. =)

Agreed, most of my sims ran for a few machine-months at a shot.  The key
with 2.4 (and 2.5) was to wait until a couple more OS revs had passed and
then patch it to the moon.  I didn't cut over to 2.4 until 2.5.1 was out.

>   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*

Unfortunately, GNU tar isn't usable either, given its blatant disregard
for the ANSI tar standards and checksum calculation.  star is the only one
I've found to be truly usable, and as far as I know it doesn't ship as the
default tar on any platform.

>   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.

There's a learning curve present, I'll grant you that.  Then again, SunOS
4 is internally much closer to 5 than the userland appears.  Calling SunOS
4 "BSD" is one hell of a stretch.

>   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.

IMHO 2.4 was the turning point, and that's when I made my switch.  2.3 and
previous were nigh-unusable, I definitely agree.  I will mention that I
didn't cut over to 2.4 until after 2.5.1 was released, to give it a
respectable "soaking period" patchwise.  It wasn't until 7 that I felt
that the Solaris codebase had become solid enough to trust it at or near
FCS.

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

I was running it on my 4/330 back in '96.  Slow, to be sure, but hardly
unusable with sufficient RAM.  _WABI_ was unusable.  :)

-James