Hello, first of all, I decided to give SXDE 1/08 a try and use it for day-to-day C++/Java development. The main reason behind the move was horrible ZFS performance on Linux, so I'd like to test a "native" speed. After the switch I can claim that now my home (ZFS-based) directory is really flying, on the other hand there are some issues (in comparison with Linux) which I'd like to note here (as this seems to be Solaris on the desktop dedicated discussion). First of all, my current machine is old AMD64 1.8GHz + 1GB RAM (Asus A8V board). I'm migrating from Ubuntu 7.10 and, my desktop usage pattern is simple: Thunderbird, Firefox (with a lot of tabs and windows open), gnome-terminal with tabs and emacs for coding and the folding at home client running on the background (which means in Solaris having it running in dedicated BrandZ of CentOS 3). The issues are as follows:
1) VM/scheduler issue: I precisely cannot identify the culprit, but I'm surprised by the fact how some applications startup is longer than on Linux (Firefox/Thunderbird). Also they seem to consume much more memory after short period of time than on Linux. The problem is that simply disk's light is lightening much more intensively than on Linux. I don't know why it's working so steadily while for example starting Firefox. Also I don't understand what for example this means: karel at silence:~$ swap -sh total: 564M allocated + 100M reserved = 664M used, 1.7G available does it mean that 664MB of swap is already in use? But why when I just do have firefox/thunderbird/xterm/folding at home running together with all other Solaris services? The second issue in this category is that when machine starts swapping intensively (I guess this is swapping when drive is lightening like mad), X window desktop starts to be really unresponsive. The problem is that a load on the machine is much lighter than the load on Linux which I would need to make in order to make machine that unresponsive/swapping like hell. But this is not only with swapping, there are some other situation where X are really slow/lagging (mouse cursor, window/desktop over-draw etc.), but I'm not able to provide more info about the certain load now. 2) ZFS load avarage peeks: this is not the only disadvantage of Solaris since I already seen this on Linux with ZFS/FUSE, but sometimes -- usually during the C++ project build process I see load-avarage graph going up from expected 2-3 value to more than 7. I just guess this is something ZFS related, since it does not happen on Linux when I don't use ZFS. I still need to duplicate this and test build on Solaris' UFS. 3) gnome-terminal slowness. Yes, I know gnome-terminal is slow. It's even slow on Linux, but in comparison with Linux where it was usable and I used it, on Solaris it is not usable at all (for me). It's simply too slow and consumes too much of CPU power for so simple things like printing make output. I wonder how is it possible that simple build with make and make's output consumes soo much CPU and build slow down evidently? So on Solaris I was forced to use plain old xterm which in comparison with gnome-terminal is really fast. 4) poor software support for hardware monitoring: I'm used to see on gnome panel applets for CPU/motherboard and all hard-drives temperatures. I'm also used to run a long version of SMART tests on all the disks weekly by using smartmontools and review the status then. Nothing from this is possible on my SXDE 1/08. Possible solution (for my particular case): next month I'm going to order new machine with more RAM (4-8GB). I hope this will solve at least Solaris' swapping issue. Solving of (4) is possible, but I wouldn't like to use this route now: running Linux in dom0 and Solaris in domU (already tested). I think Solaris should be able to run well on bare-metal, providing all the monitoring details :-) And what's your experience? Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in some of my assumption. Thanks, Karel This message posted from opensolaris.org
