[OpenIndiana-discuss] Shell to use?

[Jim Klimov]

On January 19, 2021 4:27:04 AM UTC, Hung Nguyen Gia via openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:
>OI included many shells. So far I only stick with the default, bash.
>
>But the performance is very bad. e.g: when using pkgsrc to build
>packages.
>
>As I have said on this list: pkgsrc bootstrap on OI is 4x slower than
>on FreeBSD. Building packages also that slower.
>
>I think the problem is of the shell. Because I see it checking for
>something very slowly.
>
>The output printed on the screen 'Checking for...' is line by line,
>very slow. Meanwhile, the same thing on FreeBSD is blazing fast that I
>can't even see what's going on at all.
>
>I'm thinking about using other shell than bash.
>
>But I can't test with each shell. They are too many.
>
>From your own experience, which shell is the fastest?
>
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This matches my experience sadly, also on systems with ksh93 as the real default system shell since Solaris, and e.g. configure scripts using that as-is or patched to use bash explicitly.

Same codebase mounted from OI over NFS to a Linux VM passes configuration much faster - so it is not e.g. overheads of disk/FS layers.

Similarly for shell/fork heavy tests like https://github.com/42ity/JSON.sh unit-testing (nearly zero I/O, but lots of shells tried) - the linux worker completes minutes before OI does.

As far as I could unravel and guess, this is just about a more expensive forking routine (RBAC and all) than on less protective OSes. This is a PITA sadly, but unless something is just broken in the kernel but rather really does more work by design because of different goals and trade-offs, then so be it.

If something *is* broken and can be made faster, it would be much appreciated :-)

Jim

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