[OpenIndiana-discuss] Shell to use?

[Peter Tribble]

> 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.
>

Process creation (fork/exec) has been known to be slow on Solaris (and thus
illumos) for years.
Unfortunately things like configure and an awful lot of build tools spawn a
huge number of
processes - this is horrendously inefficient on all platforms, but the
slowdown on the platforms
where most of this stuff originates isn't so obviously bad that there's
motivation to fix it.

(Generally, Solaris and illumos are optimized for well-behaved software,
Linux is optimised for
badly behaved software. Unfortunately, there's a lot more badly behaved
software out there
than good stuff.)


> From your own experience, which shell is the fastest?
>

I tried replacing sh with dash as the system shell, and it gave a decent
improvement in things
like boot times.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/