[OpenIndiana-discuss] About the Gnome "slowdowns"

[Sriram Narayanan]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Ken Gunderson <kgunders at teamcool.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-06-22 at 19:24 +0530, Sriram Narayanan wrote:
>> Hi everyone:
>>
>> I've been using openindiana as my primary desktop environment while I
>> work on Belenix related development (illumos kernel, rpm, etc).
>>
>> I've not felt a single slow down ever in my use of OI. I've used both
>> build 147 as well as 148. IPS sucks for me given the low bandwidth and
>> the calculations it does each time. But Gnome itself it fine.
>>
>> However, I've seen these recent threads (one on branding, and one test
>> drive) where Gnome was mentioned as being slow.
>>
>> Has anyone else also experienced this ? Are there any known reasons ?
>
> Pretty much everything seems to run slower on "Slowaris" on the desktop
> front.  If in doubt, buy another hd, same as you're using now, and make
> a native install Linux poison of choice, e.g. Fedora 15, Debian-6, etc.
> (i.e. not virtualized) and the difference is quite noticeable.
>

"Slowlaris" was a term used only for the TCP/IP stack of Solaris 9.
The entire TCP/IP stack was changed with the FireEngine project which
improved things a lot. Crossbow built on top of that and brought about
even further improvements.

Solaris 10 and above are not "slow".

> Solaris derivatives like OI have their attractions.  But speed isn't one
> of them. At least this is my experience, since you asked. Let the flame
> fest begin...
>

I have asked if others have seen a slow Gnome desktop with OI, and if
they know the reasons for this.

Ken, I use a 4500 rpm disk for belenix and illumos builds, and
everything works just fine for me. This has been the case since 2006.

I run a very large setup at work, and I'm soon going to move over all
our source code systems (git, hg, svn) onto openindiana.

Here are some numbers that I consistently get every month (I check
every month) for a specific disk intensive activity:
5400 rpm disk - Windows XP - 38 minutes
5400 rpm disk - Windows Server 2008 - 23 minutes
5400 rpm disk - Windows 7 - 17 minutes
5400 rpm disk - FC13 - 12 minutes
7200 rpm disk - Windows 7 - 17 minutes
7200 rpm disk - OSX - 8 minutes
4500 rpm disk - openindiana/illumos/build_111a  - 4.5 minutes

Here's another set of numbers:
P4 2.2 Ghz with 2.72 TB RAIDZ and 8 GB RAM running Solaris 10 update 8
used for serving iSCSI content off ZFS filesystems ->  I have a
specific requirement where I've snapshotted a 600 GB ZFS filesystem
containing 9 VMs, and have then cloned this 20 times. This is for a
test setup. After the cloning and regular use, I see that an overall
diskspace of 800 GB has been used.

I get no noticable performance difference at all. And this is with a
single Ethernet card.

These are my numbers.

Given the above, and my own work with Belenix, as well as zero Gnome
issues with OI, I've asked if anyone knows more.

This was not asked to incite a flamefest, and I request that we don't
walk that path.

> --
> Regards-- Ken Gunderson
>
>
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