[MUD-Dev] Preference for host OS

[Brian Tackett]

Brian Hook wrote in part...
> Re: Solaris/x86

>   From all my friends, the generalization is: "It sucks, but that
>   was a long time ago, and it may not suck now".  Followed by
>   several people saying that it definitely doesn't suck now.
>   However I don't know anyone that used it back in the "Bad days"
>   (ca. 1995) and still uses it today and can thus comment on the
>   differences/improvements.

I started using Solaris x86 in 1995. At that time, the Intel tree
definitely suffered, in my opinion primarily from a lack of
attention.  My complaints at that time (relevant since it was used
to host a MUD among other things) were lack of mature SMP support,
lack of device drivers and overall sluggishness with small memory
supplies.

Things have definitely improved greatly since then. I currently have
Solaris x86 deployed in production, primarily as a web and
application server, and all of the problems (IMO) have been resolved
except for the latter. Memory management in the Intel tree has
definitely improved, but IMO Solaris in general does not perform
optimally without a relatively large amount of memory. For me, this
isn't a problem since all of my boxes have at least 2 gig of
physical memory, but if you want something to run in 64MB or so, I'd
suggest not using Solaris.

Brian Tackett

P.S: x86 benchmarking can be difficult, since to compare it to
Solaris SPARC is fiendishly difficult, requiring hardware comparison
as it does. In GENERAL however, my experience is that both features
and performance tend to be one to two releases ahead in the SPARC
world. i.e. things that were deployed to 2.6 in the SPARC world came
out in 7 or 8 for Intel.

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