From: casper@fwi.uva.nl (Casper H.S. Dik)
Subject: Re: SPARCclassic and SunOS 4.1.x
Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 17:54:28 GMT

carson@cs.columbia.edu (Carson A. Gaspar) writes:

>I, personally, have nothing against the SVR4 API.  It's the
>_implementation_ that is horrible.  The code as shipped from USL is
>horrible (unless SVR4.2 fixed things) and many vendors actually ship
>it without re-writing so it works properly and performs decently.

We have the SVR4.2 code and yes, it doesn't look nice. We never ran
it on any hardware, so I can't judge the performance.

>Now, as far as I know, Sun has fixed the known bugs in USL's code, and
>has greatly improved performance. _HOWEVER_, the numbers still show
>that 4.1.3 is _much_ faster than Solaris 2.1.  Now, if you have a sun
>multi-processor machine, Solaris 2.1 may be faster as it _finally_
>implements an SMP kernal.  Of course, solbourne has an SMP kernal
>based on 4.1.3 that screams, but they don't sell their OS for
>non-solbourne hardware (too bad).

I don't know where you get the ``_much_ faster than''. The
press releases tell us there is a difference in the areas were
performance was affected most of about -10%. Some performance was actually
improvement over 4.x. I've just started to play with Solaris 2.1
(much faster than 2.0) on an SLC, and I don't feel that it is
slower than 4.x. I'm also impressed by the ease of installation and
the new features that make things easier to handle. I'm just not
sure whether all these new features will scale well in an large
installation.

>The real question is - when is Sun going to stop slowing down the O/S
>with each major release (I know several people who have upgraded to
>SunOS 3.x for performance improvements - they find it unfortunate that
>they can't run it on all their Sun hardware).

My feeling is that they just did. If we disregard 2.0 (which was
a test release, nothing more), we can say that 2.x isn't much slower
than 4.x, especially considering that they are still tuning Solaris 2.x.
What bothers me most is the always increasing memory use. You could
run 3.x in 4MB, you needed 8MB to get 4.x going, now you need 12MB to
get Solaris 2.x going. (The memory sizes are the absolute minimum,
to be fair to Solaris 2.x, it should be noted that that memory requirement
is because the installation is done swapless. Need feature, being able
to remove all disk-based swapspace)

>						Sun (and, to be fair,
>most O/S vendors) keep shipping systems that are more and more
>bloated.  There are several alternative kernal architechtures that
>have been implemented, tested, and proven to outpreform monolithic
>kernals (Henry Massalin's Synthesis spawns threads about an order of
>magnitude faster than SunOS calls functions).  It's well past time
>that the industry took advantage of the new technology.  Mach is a
>nice first round, and proof that you can maintain the familiar API(or
>APIs!) while greatly improving performance.  While NeXTStep has not
>yet moved to the Mach microkernal (due to stability considerations),
>it will be interesting to pit NeXTStep 486 against other vendors' SVR4
>(including Solaris) on the same hardware and see what the numbers have
>to say.

This would definitely interest me too. In a few months time we will be able
to benchmark NeXTStep 486 vs Solaris 2.x/368 (or whatever they will call it)
vs linux vs 368BSD vs BSDI vs the different SVR4s (Destiny/Dell etc) on
exactly the same hardware. The numbers will tell us.

(I've changed the newsgroups headers a bit, this doesn't seem to belong in
a misc.forsale.* group)

Casper
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