Are Sunblade 1000s slow?
I've typically run Debian on x86 hardware and on Mac G3/G4s, and love
Debian.
A couple of years ago I started dabbling with Sun machines, specifically
Sunblade 100s running Solaris 8 (having never had any Sun/Solaris/other
unix (other than Linux) experience before). Suffice it to say I was not
impressed with Solaris. So last summer I put Debian on one of the
Sunblade 100s for a week or two before it had to be converted back to
Solaris. I didn't have long to play with it, but I liked Debian better
than Solaris on the box. But that was last year, and I really don't have
much memory of it (except that the nfs connection to a Sun server get
hanging the box).
This year, I've gotten the opportunity to put Debian on a Sunblade 1000
(with 1GB RAM - whoo-hoo!). However, now that it's running Debian, it
seems awfully sluggish. Of course, it seemed somewhat sluggish under
Solaris 8 also, but I was hoping Debian would make a difference.
However, Debian feels like it's running on a 200MHz Pentium II box. My
933MHz PIII feels like it runs circles around this Sunblade 1000.
So are Sunblade 1000s just inherently slower than the average x86
machines, or is there some tweak that I'm missing, or what? It seems
slower in both console and X. Like for example, I'll do an "apt-get
upgrade", and the downloading of the packages from the net seems about
the same on the two architectures, but when apt starts unpacking and
configuring the packages, it just seems slower on the Sun box. Another
example is when I run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86"; it just seems
to take 15 or 20 seconds of "thinking" between the command and the
appearance of the ncurses dialog on the Sun, whereas the same command on
my PIII comes up almost instantly. Or when I copy and paste this email
message into a nano session in an xterm window on the Sun box, it draws
each line slow enough that I can almost read it as it's being pasted (to
be fair, I'm a fast reader).
Thanks for any insight!
--
Kent
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