20 Feb
2020
20 Feb
'20
11 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 11:48:03AM -0500, Nemo wrote:
On 20/02/2020, arnold(a)skeeve.com
<arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote (in part):
I was the lead guy on Sun's first cluster product, I developed it on
SunOS 4.x but Scott wouldn't let me ship that, it had to be Solaris.
Which screwed performance, it was an NFS server so all that traffic was
going through STREAMS, it was awful.
I gave a pitch for that product at the Moscone center and had to endure
heckle after heckle about 5.x vs 4.x. I toed the party line for as long
as I could and finally I had enough and said something like "I know.
5.x sucks, it just does, but that's what I have to ship with."
It was taped.
Ken Okin, my boss and senior VP of all server hardware, heard the tape,
came to me and said "Find and destroy all copies of that tape. Now!"
It was not a fun time.
Also, early Solaris was a dog. Performance was
poor. It improved over
time, but it wasn't until around Solaris 2.4 or 2.5 that running it wasn't
painful.
I recall that Sun salesfolk came in to sell us something-or-other and
freely admitted that Slowlaris did not improve until dtrace came
along, at which point Sun dived into system calls.