[Suns-at-Home] Solaris 10/JDS on U10/5

[Ron Wickersham]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2006, Eric R. Pizzani wrote:

> Hey all,
> I was wondering what experiences people have had with Solaris 10 and
> in addition, Solaris 10 while running the Java Desktop System on the
> Ultra 10 (and Ultra 5 for that matter).
> I've personally found it to be somewhat disappointing however, I read
> somewhere that the Ultra 10 and 5 had 'crippled' IDE channels, and
> was wondering if anyone thought that this might have an effect on the
> performance? Has anyone tried running it with SCSI drives and noticed
> a difference?

i'm running Solaris 10 on an ultra 5 for quite some time:

newbatz rjw 4$uname -a
SunOS newbatz 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
newbatz rjw 5$uptime
  7:38pm  up 153 day(s), 23:19,  1 user,  load average: 0.17, 0.23, 0.26

with the factory disk and find it satisfactory for my use, but i'm running
CDE and with mostly terminals (35 typically) with one web browser (the
one included with the 0106 release) and 7 perf meters displayed on each
page.

it is not snappy, but is satisfactory for getting my sysadmin work done.

to see where it slows down you might want to open up the perfmeter for
localhost and display all 8 graphs.   i use horizontal format with no bars,
just the strip charts, and where it's sluggish after the web browser has
been alive for a week or so, the disk activity goes high and you get pauses
for up to 30 seconds, so a faster disk channel would certainly speed things
up for that situation.  there is no swap shown at that time, in fact i've
not seen the swap graph ever move.

i'm in the process of converting over to a new box (Sun WS2100Z, large
configuration) with the 06/06 Solaris 10 and trying to get comfortable with
JDS.  the dual Opterons, 4GB memory and 320 SCSI drives  make things pretty
snappy, compared to the Ultra 5.  i'm running them both (on separate desks)
and still feel more comfortable most of the time on the Ultra 5 with CDE.
for me, at least, JDS is taking some time to get used to.   but for watching
the movies on the Sun Web site, the faster hardware definitely is a plus.

-ron