On Sat, 16 Feb 2008, Karel Gardas wrote: > > 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
Modern Solaris is targeted for modern hardware, which means that it uses memory allocation and caching strategies which work best for modern hardware. Since many Linux users use older hardware, there is more focus on reducing memory use. It is unlikely that the applications themselves are using more memory just because they are running under Solaris. Something you need to be aware of since you are using ZFS is that ZFS is a huge memory hog (on purpose to provide better caching) but with your small memory you may want to reduce the amount it is allowed to use. See "http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide#Limiting_the_ARC_Cache"; for info. > 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 This means pretty much what it says. 564M is really used storing data while 100M is reserved for something which needs it to be there for possible future use. These numbers alone are not cause for concern. > 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 This is definitely a sign of not enough RAM, or else something (e.g. ZFS) is caching in RAM too agressively. > 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 This slowness is likely something to do with rending the fonts via FreeType. It may also be that the display driver for your hardware is better in Linux than it is in Solaris. Other than to support the "save desktop" feature and clearer font rendering, it seems that gnome-terminal does not really offer much more function than xterm does. > 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 of this info is in the OS. It seems that GUI software is lacking to show it. Maybe you can help port it? > 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 This is definitely the best path forward. Given sufficient memory resources, I think that you will find that Solaris runs similarly fast to Linux from a desktop perspective. Solaris is first and foremost an OS which is optimized for large applications and large servers. It caches quite agressively in order to provide the best performance for use in servers. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
