Karel Gardas wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > > > I had the same experience.
I had AMD Athlon 3500+ CPU with 1GB RAM and SXDE was dead slow on this. I did not use ZFS or xVM. Just Firefox, Thunderbird, NetBeans, Tomcat. Firefox was the main reason I switched to Fedora. When firefox was running CPU was utilized like mad (no javascript or flash site). I could not identify the problem. After that I got a new machine. It's Core 2 DUO E6600 with 2 GB RAM. I've installed SXDE 9/07 on it and that was the first case when I said that Solaris is feeling fast. I don't know it's because of Dual core CPU, or increased RAM or just they've fixed the bug in Firefox. I will consider upgrading to 4GB after your post because I will definitely be using xVM and ZFS in the near future. -- Vano Beridze Software Developer Silk Road Group
