SunOS 4

[forsyth%minster.york.ac.uk at nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk]

Our Sun salesman has been trying to convince us to switch to SunOS 4.  We
have

	60 to 70 3/50s (all discless)
	6 3/280 file servers serving them
	1 3/260 file server

and some other bits & pieces.  (We also have some machines not made by
Sun, which will of course continue to be more BSD-like.)

Now, a common reason given to use 4.0 is the shared library system, which
reduces the memory requirements of suntools.  We, however, have our own
graphics library, based on software from elsewhere, and that is only 40 to
50kbytes.  Obviously we could get 10 or 11 copies of it in the space
occupied by one copy of the shared SunView library!  Dynamic linking is
very much not of interest to us.  I should like to know

	- how reliable have people found 4.0 to be in configurations similar to
	  the above.
	- how big is a reasonably configured kernel for a 3/50?
	- is response better or worse than it was under SunOS 3.5?
	- how well has Sun responded to software problems?

Past experience of Sun suggests that hype exceeds performance, but I
should like something more solid one way or the other.

forsyth at minster.york.ac.uk
ukc!minster!forsyth

PS. Memory upgrades are right out.