Re: Are Sunblade 1000s slow?
David S. Miller wrote:
On Fri, 03 Oct 2003 06:56:25 -0500
Kent West <westk@acu.edu> wrote:
Ah, this is the information I needed. I would've thought a sb1000
would've been considerably zippier than a 3-year old Pentium3 machine,
but what I'm hearing you say is that may not necessarily be the case.
What exactly do you want to "go fast" on this sb1000 machine?
I want the machine to feel zippier than a Windows-based computer in a
typical dorm room. This machine is one of four that will be in a
university Computer Science lab, along with 16 SunBlade 100s running
Solaris 8 that have been in place for a year. The 1000s will be running
Debian. The 100s will be mostly used for Java programming classes, and
some web browsing, etc. The 1000s will be more for tinkering.
I was hoping the students could see Debian in a very responsive fashion,
so it's more attactive than Solaris on the smaller boxes, and more
attactive than their (expectedly but no) slower Windows boxes back in
their dorm rooms.
What metrics are you using to determine whether the thing you
desire to use this box for is going "fast" or "slow"?
Desktop usage/tinkering. I wanted Solitaire to have the cards fly by
faster than a speeding bullet; I wanted Mozilla to pop up faster than IE
on their dorm computers; I wanted zippiness.
These are the kinds of things you should have been saying in
your initial posting, instead of saying vague things...
That's just it; I don't have any real metrics; it's just a "vague" subjective feel that the box is slow.
It's apparently just a matter of unrealistic expectations. I haven't had
a lot of experience with Sun; a couple of years ago when I started
working with Sun/Solaris/the SB100s, I was expecting great machines;
after all, this is Sun! But I was terribly disappointed in them; they
seemed slow; the OS seemed clunky; they shipped with Netscape 4.x!!!!
etc. But then I tempered my disappointment with the knowledge that these
boxes were Sun's low-end machines, and since Sun is a high-end sort of
company, perhaps they just haven't gotten the low-end down yet, so okay,
"Sun's low end is disappointing compared to a typical x86 box:" But then
these Sunblade 1000s arrived on campus, and everybody seemed to be
"ooh"ing and "ah"ing over them, and I thought "Oh, these must be above
the low-end, and will match the 'super duper awesome' reputation of Sun
hardware. I can't wait." And then when I actually start playing with
them, "Like wow! Why didn't we just purchase much cheaper Athlon boxes
and get more for our money?" So surely I just have something
misconfigured which is making these boxes much slower than I expected
them to be. Only now I'm finding out that "No, Athlon boxes are faster
than these Sun boxes."
So it's just a perception issue I reckon. I guess Sun hardware is known
more for reliability perhaps (although with the 4 or 5 monitors we've
lost in the past year and the one mobo - and a 1-year warranty instead
of 3?!!, so that the mobo goes just after the warranty expires - makes
me think "maybe not").
In short, I just haven't seen any reason yet to get excited about Sun
hardware or software. I reckon it has its place (very high end?), but I
haven't personally witnessed it.
So basically this thread was just my learning that my expectations were
too high. Dude, next time I'll get a Dell :-)
Thanks for everyone's input!
--
Kent
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