forsyth%minster.york.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk (12/21/88)
Our Sun salesman has been trying to convince us to switch to SunOS 4. We have 60 to 70 3/50s (all discless) 6 3/280 file servers serving them 1 3/260 file server and some other bits & pieces. (We also have some machines not made by Sun, which will of course continue to be more BSD-like.) Now, a common reason given to use 4.0 is the shared library system, which reduces the memory requirements of suntools. We, however, have our own graphics library, based on software from elsewhere, and that is only 40 to 50kbytes. Obviously we could get 10 or 11 copies of it in the space occupied by one copy of the shared SunView library! Dynamic linking is very much not of interest to us. I should like to know - how reliable have people found 4.0 to be in configurations similar to the above. - how big is a reasonably configured kernel for a 3/50? - is response better or worse than it was under SunOS 3.5? - how well has Sun responded to software problems? Past experience of Sun suggests that hype exceeds performance, but I should like something more solid one way or the other. forsyth@minster.york.ac.uk ukc!minster!forsyth PS. Memory upgrades are right out.