[OpenIndiana-discuss] The shell performance is bad

[Hung Nguyen Gia]

On OpenIndiana, they bootstrapping of pkgsrc from source took exactly 8 mins on a VM with 4 cores 4 GB of RAM.

(exact value, not recall, I no longer run OI but I recorded it).

Oi FreeBSD, with the very same VM configuration, took only a bit more than 2 mins!

What caused the huge different?

The output printed on the screen is also much much faster on FreeBSD than OI.

It seemed to be a problem with Illumos in general.

OmniOS took the same time, even though the output printed on the screen seemed to be a bit faster.

Is it the shell's problem? I guest it's very likely.

But it's the Bash shell all the way! On FreeBSD, I also use Bash.

Does this because stdio performance issue? For some reasons, the output printing speed on OI is just slower?

Or it is because on OI, pkgsrc has to use cwrapper to wrap the toolchain?

It must be used to have 64 bit abi bootstrap.

On FreeBSD, no --abi 64 has to be specified.

And what is wrappers? They are just shell scripts again. Now we back to the shell as the starting point.

I used to want to have a pkgsrc repo of myself just build for OI, so I don't have incompatibility problems like Joyent's, since they build on SmartOS.

I think it should be a VPS with 4 cpus and 8 GB of RAM, SSD space could be added more if needed.

But now I think it's unrealistic. Building for OI wasted 4x of the time than for FreeBSD. The cost will be 4x, too.

I appreciate anyone building packages for OI. Given how much love they have for the OS.

I would just cancel the build right away and switch to build something else if it's too slow.