[OpenIndiana-discuss] About the Gnome "slowdowns"

[Sriram Narayanan]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Ken Gunderson <kgunders at teamcool.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-06-22 at 21:13 +0530, Sriram Narayanan 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.
>
> Hence my hesitancy to even reply in the first place. Since you mentioned
> Gnome specifically, my comments were directed specifically to
> desktop/workstation usage.  Perhaps such is not the case with disk I/O
> or tcp/ip throughput. But again, such was also not the topic of your
> query.
>
> So back to your specific questions: "Has anyone else also experienced
> this ? Are there any known reasons ?"
>
> In _my_ experience Gnome is significantly slower on s10, OS, and OI. I
> have not investigated as to why this might be, as it pretty much always
> has been my experience, so I've just accepted it as one of the "costs"
> one pays to get the "benefits" of features such as zfs, crossbow, zones,
> etc. If this is not your experience, then that's fine with me. I have
> better things to do than argue the matter.
>

Replying to you privately...

>
> --
> Regards-- Ken Gunderson
>
>
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