SUMMARY: Solaris 2.5 on Ultra-2 - implications?

Chris Murphy (murphycm@aston.ac.uk)
Thu, 12 Jun 1997 18:54:11 +0100

I asked about the implications of running Solaris 2.5 on an ultra 2
(2170) as opposed to 2.5.1. There was a wide variety of opinions but
I gather that Solaris 2.5.1 is only necessary if I want to extract
maximum performance from the 64 bit hardware architecture and the two
processors. The bugs I reported are probably due to the fact that I
haven't patched it.

Thanks to

mjb@liffe.com
Dan Brainard <brainard@ihs.com>
robin.landis@imail.exim.gov
gobbers@faw.uni-ulm.de (Dieter Gobbers )
Stephen Harris <sweh@mpn.com>
Chris Marble <cmarble@orion.ac.hmc.edu>
pauls@esteem.co.uk (Paul Simpson)
David Lee <T.D.Lee@durham.ac.uk>
Scott MacDonald <scott@msi-uk.com>
Justin Young <justiny@cluster.engr.subr.edu>

My original question was:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For six months we have been operating our Ultra-2 (model 2170 I think)
with Solaris 2.5. I now hear that the Ultra is supposed to run
2.5.1. What are the implications of running the the 2.5 version? We
have had some problems as follows:

* The /usr/openwin/bin/X process starts with about 16 MB of memory but
that rapidly increases, sometimes to as high as 30-40 MB after a few
days. It basically never goes down.

* It has a tendency to crash when the swap space is getting full.

* The screen never blanks - we have to turn the monitor off
overnight.

Does anyone know if any of these problems are likely to be caused by
the wrong OS being installed and if not, do we really have to upgrade?

-- 
|                Chris Murphy: Aston Space Geodesy,                 |
|    Civil Engineering, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK     |
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