From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <006e01c2cdf5$eb2187c0$4ef0b487@bl.belllabs.com>
From: "Tharaneedharan Vilwanathan" <dharani@lucent.com>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0302060804520.10561-100000@carotid.ccs.lanl.gov>
Subject: Re: [9fans] GCC3.0 [Was; Webbrowser]
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Date: Thu,  6 Feb 2003 10:39:21 -0500
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Hi,

I like the current implementation of Plan 9. It is sufficiently fast,
stable, clean and simple to understand. If there is a severe performance
problem, someone always takes care of it.

I wouldnt worry about the 10% performance difference between Plan 9
implementation and FreeBSD or Linux. What matters is whether we can tolerate
the performance loss. As long as my apps like acme, sam, charon, etc run
sufficiently fast, why would I worry?

I also like the clean screen when Plan 9 (rio) starts: it is like starting
with a clean slate.

Regards
dharani

> On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp wrote:
>
> > I think the speed is not the main matter of Plan 9, anyway.
>
> My memory is at some point it was. An intro by Honeyman at the '89 Usenix
> for a Plan 9 speaker ended with "... and he can't believe how slow X11
> is". Gosh, was it even called Plan 9 then? Is my memory wrong? I think it
> was starting to be called Plan 9.
>
> Did speed stop being a goal when Plan 9 got slower? Personally, I like
> speedy OSes. I do recall an Infocomm in 1996 where a speaker from Bell
> Labs (Holmdel) presented numbers showing FreeBSD running 10% faster than
> Plan 9 for some TCP measurements. I was surprised, as until that time I
> had assumed Plan 9 would be faster. So had the speaker. So had, according
> to the speaker, the folks at Murray Hill. Nobody expected FreeBSD to win
> that race.
>
> Side note: at some point (late 70s) I think I used just about every OS
> that ran on a PDP11 (including the Pascal-based one from Hansen, not the
> boy-band, but Per Brinch). For speed, V6 Unix always crushed them all,
> including the vendor OSes which were supposed to be so much superior (e.g.
> RSX). Speed was one distinguishing feature of Unix, the others being
> better design, code, capabilities, and, oh, everything else.
>
> We know Plan 9 has the better design, code, capabilities, etc. It would be
> nice at some point to be able to say that speed is a distinguishing
> feature of Plan 9. Is it fundamentally impossible?
>
> ron
>