-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:59:40 +0100,
unix_fan <tmellman@web.de> wrote:
> 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.
>

Are they both USB2.0 devices?

Some desktops have USB1.1 ports for slow things like keyboards, and
USB2.0 for faster things like disks.

Check also that the port is connected to the drive in USB2.0 mode, it's
possible that the older driver was loaded perhaps.

> 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!!))
>
>

I boot a linux system from a 512MB keydrive. Works great.

> 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.
>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFF/YOxd90bcYOAWPYRAn9mAJ9pj2kwVzMDWI0znCHqw6y4mmqEnAC gsr7z
actAkAzWemGYaVj6rAnalB8=
=H7dx
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--
Jim Richardson http://www.eskimo.com/~warlock
To err is human...to really foul up requires the root password.