[OpenIndiana-discuss] About the Gnome "slowdowns"

[Colin Ellis]

Hi,

I run OI 148 + patches on a sony laptop with 4GB of RAM using gnome as a
desktop.  I can say for me I don't notice any desktop slowness.

A couple of points:

-My graphics card is reasonably well supported.
-My laptop has plenty of ram - often an issue that can cause slowness as OI
loves to cache disks heavily.
-the default flash player is broken on 148 and gives issues with full screen
video etc.  Once that was updated I am able to play full screen HD video
flawlessly.  I also have custom-built blender that I also use without any
issue and can render images at a similar speed to linux.
-I updated my bios to allow me full 64 bit access

Bugs I have found:
-Gnome occasionally ends up corrupting itself on shutdown - not sure what's
causing it and its not often enough to spend my time on.  I end up losing
one of the top applets and have to re-insert it.
-NWAM keeps losing my wifi connection.  It's a nasty program and needs
replacing with something that works properly.


I haven;t found any good reason not to use OI as a desktop (work) machine.
One thing I would maybe push for is out of the box support for other
filesystems such as ext2/3/4, vfat, etc

Rgds,

Colin

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Sriram Narayanan <sriram at belenix.org>wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> > OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Belenix: www.belenix.org
>
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