I just had an interesting experience - a task I had was about 67x faster
under Solaris than when I'd previously run it under SuSE Linux.

I keep backups in a format I call .cgz - compressed cpio.

I have such a backup that's about 6gig of uncompressed data.

I wanted to expand it from the DVD it's on onto a new USB drive I have.

It just took 36 hours to run the command:

gzip -cd /media/K3something-or-other | cpio -icvd usb-dir

I don't recall that creating the backup took overnight, but extracting it
certainly did.

Just on a hunch, I ran the restore on the Solaris system I just set up on
the USB drive. It took about 32 minutes.

You can't believe what a joy it was to see the DVD light on solid, rather
than the stumbling sometimes on, sometimes off that happened under Linux.


Some details to the task/test:

The Linux test was from my desktop which has SuSE 10 running on an
approximately 1GHz cpu and about 256 MB memory.

The Solaris (10) test was from my laptop with about a 1 GHz cpu and about
512 MB memory.

I also have Linux on my USB disk (which is much less graceful than the
Solaris instance, because I haven't gone through the trouble of creating
an initrd file for it yet, so I have to boot Linux by first starting a CD
install and then aborting it. Solaris doesn't seem to have any special
problem booting from the USB disk (except for the day I lost because it
never occurred to me that it matters what USB socket you plug it into!!))


In an attempt to isolate things a bit - frustrated and angry after the 36
hour wait - and before I tried with Solaris - I did the decompress first
and then ran the cpio separately under Linux booted from the USB onto my
laptop. Maybe it was something about my desktop configuration.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the time data, because after again about 36
hours of chugging away, the job descended into a hang and had to be power
cycled.


Doing the separate copy and decompress from the DVD to the USB (executed
on the desktop):


06/sdb6/tmp>dc
4k
2756697578 99 60*39+/p
461063.3179
1024/p
450.2571

450K bytes/sec! Instead of 480M bytes/sec!


So, everything is slow!

For me, there's no question anymore - now that Solaris is open source - or
source-available or whatever you want to call it - I'm ready to put up
with the hardships of changing.