4 ms·

> What were the primary use cases for Solaris in its prime? I used to administer many Solaris hosts in the past and they were super reliable for hosting enterp

> What were the primary use cases for Solaris in its prime? I used to administer many Solaris hosts in the past and they were super reliable for hosting enterprise services like mail, NFS, NIS, etc. Kernel panics were pretty rare. One really nice feature is that there’s no concept of out of memory killer. I remember one day our LDAP host went haywire and the load average shot up to something like 800. I was able to still get in as root and kill the offending processes. I have fond memories of Solaris 10, including ZFS, dtrace, zones, SMF. The X4500 “Thumper” storage appliances were pretty bad ass back in the day.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> One really nice feature is that there’s no concept of out of memory killer. I remember one day our LDAP host went haywire and the load average shot up to something like 800. I was able to still get in as root and kill the offending processes. What does it do when it’s out of memory?
- throw0101a 5y ago
  Solaris didn't (still doesn't?) allow processes to allocate memory when none was available. If a program called malloc() and RAM+swap was full, the call returned an error (and ideally the program handled it). IIRC, the BSDs are the same way as well by default. Linux is the main Unix-y system that allows over-allocation.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Funny, I had the opposite question when I started using Linux more often. NetBSD is like Solaris. Running out of memory is not a big deal. I use RAM for the filesystem, so it does happen occassionally. On Linux, the effect of running out of memory was quite a surprise.
throwawayboise 5y ago
Also databases. If you were running Oracle in those days, it was almost certainly on Solaris.
iso1631 5y ago
> The X4500 “Thumper” storage appliances were pretty bad ass back in the day. When you dropped it on your toe I think the instructions suggested a 4 person (5?) lift into the bay. Even with a hydraulic trolley to get it to the right level we used three people.
znpy 5y ago
> One really nice feature is that there’s no concept of out of memory killer. Interesting... So what happened if you ran out of memory ?

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

> One really nice feature is that there’s no concept of out of memory killer. I remember one day our LDAP host went haywire and the load average shot up to something like 800. I was able to still get in as root and kill the offending processes. What does it do when it’s out of memory?

throw0101a 5y ago
Solaris didn't (still doesn't?) allow processes to allocate memory when none was available. If a program called malloc() and RAM+swap was full, the call returned an error (and ideally the program handled it). IIRC, the BSDs are the same way as well by default. Linux is the main Unix-y system that allows over-allocation.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Funny, I had the opposite question when I started using Linux more often. NetBSD is like Solaris. Running out of memory is not a big deal. I use RAM for the filesystem, so it does happen occassionally. On Linux, the effect of running out of memory was quite a surprise.

throwawayboise 5y ago

Also databases. If you were running Oracle in those days, it was almost certainly on Solaris.

iso1631 5y ago

> The X4500 “Thumper” storage appliances were pretty bad ass back in the day. When you dropped it on your toe I think the instructions suggested a 4 person (5?) lift into the bay. Even with a hydraulic trolley to get it to the right level we used three people.

znpy 5y ago

> One really nice feature is that there’s no concept of out of memory killer. Interesting... So what happened if you ran out of memory ?