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by Bluecobra 1703 days ago
I think the Slowlaris moniker was not due to Solaris itself, but the speed of their SPARC processors. I used to work very closely with x86 Solaris for financial trading and it was performant (and stable!) on Intel hardware at the time (circa 2010). At the time Solaris 10 was feee as in beer. When Oracle took over they got rid of this and wanted $1K per CPU socket per year on non Sun/Oracle hardware. Needless to say everything went to Linux rather quickly.

I do prefer FreeBSD over most Linux distros (except Slackware) from a philosophical standpoint.
4 comments
zokula 1691 days ago
Slowlaris: /slo'�lahr�is/, n.

[Usenet; poss. from the variety of prosimian called a “slow loris”. The variant ‘Slowlartus’ is also common, related to LART]

Common hackish term for Solaris, Sun's System VR4 version of Unix that came out of the standardization wars of the early 1990s. So named because especially on older hardware, responsiveness was much less crisp than under the preceding SunOS. Early releases of Solaris (that is, Solaris 2, as some marketroids at Sun retroactively rechristened SunOS as Solaris 1) were quite buggy, and Sun was forced by customer demand to support SunOS for quite some time. Newer versions are acknowledged to be among the best commercial Unix variants in 1998, but still lose single-processor benchmarks to Sparc Linux.

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mprovost 1703 days ago
The Slowlaris name is much older than that, going back to when they made the switch from BSD to System V in 1991. You could install either the retroactively named Solaris 1.x versions or the new 2.x on the same hardware, and everyone noticed that the new OS was much slower.
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kloch 1703 days ago
It wasn't just old hardware. Upgrading from SunOS to the early Solaris versions on the same hardware was noticeably slower. 2.4 was the first usable version IMO and it improved a lot by the time 2.6 was out (but then they dropped support for older hardware).
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vermaden 1703 days ago
I am not sure when Slowlaris term was introduced but I tried OpenSolaris many times on the same hardware that I run FreeBSD and it felt slower for each task ... from the boot process to typical tasks involved.

But I always liked SUN Solaris for its features and solutions.

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