Subject: Re: 2.2 -> 2.3 -> 2.4: differences?

From: [email-masked] (Bart Smaalders)
Date: 25 May 1994 23:44:42 GMT

In article [email-masked], [email-masked] (Ruth Milner) writes:

>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Casper H.S. Dik) writes:
>>Solaris 2.3 OW 3.3 is *much* faster than SunOS 4.1.x OW 3.0.
>
>That may very well be true, but it wasn't noticeable on a 16MB system.
>There was too much paging going on for everything for any speedup in OW 
>to help. Of course it might have been even worse without that. :-)
>
>The point is that, if you are really doing much on the system, 16MB just
>isn't enough for Solaris 2.3. And since this is true on an SS1, it's bound
>to be even more so for faster systems.

Depends entirely on the workload....  but I agree, for a significant
desktop load (mailtool, cm, filemgr, imagetool, etc), one needed closer
to 32 M of memory for 4.x-like performance with Solaris 2.3.  For many
operations, Solaris 2.3 is _much_ faster than 4.x - just try scrolling
any partially obscured window, or using cm or filemgr, or ....
However, overall 2.3 still uses significantly more memory to get 4.x
equivelent performance.

Solaris 2.4 is _faster_ (up to 20%) than SunOS 4.x in terms of desktop
performance in 24M and over configurations, with parity at just over
20Mbytes.  This is despite a very significant increase in functionality
over 4.x, including:

  1) Full internationalization (same binaries run in any locale).
  2) Imagetool with correct postscript parsing rather than pageview's
     optimistic assumptions.
  3) Various ease-of-use improvements, such as scrolling list file choosers
     rather than type-in fields, menu accelerators, etc.
  4) Increased use of tooltalk for better desktop integration.
  5) Increased functionality in cm, filemgr, etc.

For software developers and others with significant background loads,
the interactive scheduling class in 2.4 provides a very measureable
increase in desktop performance during compiles, database searches,
etc, since processes having keyboard focus (including shells &
foreground children) receive a significant boost in kernel CPU
priority.  For example, I was able to compile Motif on a SS10/52 (with
lots of memory) using parallel make with 8 jobs in the background, and
there was virtually no degradation in desktop performance (the make
completed in about 7.5 minutes).

We haven't forgotten those still using 16M platforms, though; desktop
performance for 16M machines is about 35% faster in 2.4 than 2.3.

Hope this give you an idea of what we're up to....

- Bart Smaalders	CDE Performance			SunSoft