[OpenIndiana-discuss] Shell to use?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 19 Jan 2021, Hung Nguyen Gia via openindiana-discuss wrote:

> Maybe our system just showing it age. Design decision at the time they was made are good but it's no longer true.
>
> It's time to change, if we are willing to change. There are plenty of reference sources, from both Linux or the BSDs.

I have always noticed that Solaris (and OpenIndiana) is slower to fork 
processes than Linux or FreeBSD.  It seems slower to enlarge the 
process address space as well (perhaps because it does not lie). 
Regardless, I run configure scripts under OpenIndiana and Linux very 
regularly and the performance difference is not nearly as large as you 
describe.

Using ksh93 (the normal /bin/sh shell) should be the fastest, although 
our version has some bugs which are currently being addressed by an 
update.

In the past I have compiled BSD ash (Also known as 'dash') under 
Solaris and I noticed that configure script run much faster than with 
bash.

A long time ago I profiled executing configure scripts using Dtrace 
and posted the results to the GNU Autoconf list.  Due to the findings, 
Autoconf was made a good bit faster for all systems.

There is often a common implementation element which is taking a large 
portion of the time.  For example, if 'sed' was slow, then that could 
cause a big slow down.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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