mcooper@oberon.usc.edu (Michael A. Cooper) (12/22/88)
There's been some talk in sun-spots on the poor performance of SunOS 4.0 on 4 MB Suns. We've noticed this also. Our users are running with the old SunOS 3.2 Suntools and things are still much slower than they were under SunOS 3.2 and 3.4 on 3/50's and 3/60's. On memory "rich" machines such as a 3/160 with 20 MB and 4/2[68]0's with 32 MB, SunOS 4.0 works great. I had heard rumors that this problem was discussed at the Florida SUG and some suggestions offered. I'd appreciate hearing about anything from the SUG or other suggestions. [[ Are you running the generic kernel on those machines? If you are, that should be the first ting to change (don't laugh, people do it). Sun had a document at their booth describing ways to improve the performance of 4.0 by reducing the memory it used. Your local service/sales rep. should be able to get a copy. Most of the stuff in there is pretty straightforward (don't run routed, remove unneeded drivers from config, reduce certain parameters, etc.), but we have yet to try all of them. --wnl ]] In SunOS 4.0.1 for the Sun386, the release notes said significant performance improvements have been implemented, thus reducing the minimum amount of memory for SunOS to run on a Sun386 from 8 MB to 4 MB. We are about to try that by upgrading our Sun386's to 4.0.1 and trying at least one with only 4 MB. Does anyone know if the performance improvements in the Sun386 release of 4.0.1 are going to be put into the Sun-3 and Sun-4 versions of SunOS? At this point, we're going to have to downgrade all of the 4 MB Suns we have upgrade to 4.0 so far (about 30) and postpone upgrading all other 4 MB Suns on campus until we find a solution. Michael A. Cooper, University Computing Services, U of Southern California UUCP: ...!uunet!oberon!mcooper BITNET: mcooper@kylara ARPA: mcooper@oberon.USC.EDU PHONE: (213) 743-2957