[625] in Release_7.7_team
Athena 8.0 is slow on Solaris
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Jul 8 02:23:45 1996
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 02:23:34 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
There are now multiple reports that the Athena 8.0 release is
significantly slower under Solaris than the previous release. (In
case you think e40-rtr is to blame, it probably isn't, since some of
these reports come from after the router was replaced.) This may be a
problem with Solaris 2.4, or it may be a problem with AFS 3.4a.
We can't do anything about this for fall term, but this is bad.
Inattention to this sort of problem is why the Decstations are so
unusable today even though they were cool fast machines when I was a
freshman.
Since kernel performance studies are not exactly our area of
expertise, attention to the problem should probably fall along the
following lines:
* Someone should develop a vaguely repeatable benchmark that
demonstrations the 8.0 slowness (building a moderately-sized
package with the gnu locker gcc, perhaps, or running latex
multiple times on a document). This will be a lot easier if
it's done while there are still 7.7 machines.
* Someone should start replacing components on a test machine
(upgrading to Solaris 2.5 or 2.5.1, upgrading to newer
versions of AFS as they come out) and seeing how it affects
the benchmark.
Multiple performance benchmarks are not a bad thing, and they
shouldn't take very long to try out, so I encourage anyone with a
little time to try to come up with one in the next, say, 24 hours (the
amount of time we have before 8.0 is scheduled to go public).
