ircd with Sparc Ultra and Solaris

[h.foest@xxxxxxxxx (Hanno Foest)]

Hi,

I have a bit of trouble with ircd 2.9.3 (and those before) running on a
Sparc Ultra 2 with Solaris 2.51. The machine has very little load at times,
and the irc network is small and low traffic as well. I have to set the
nicelevel of ircd to -20 to keep it running at all - if it isn't niced,
the other servers split away soon. Client connects take a long time as
well, failing eventually.

I think this is a Solaris scheduling problem which prioritizes processes
with little load down until they don't react fast enough anymore. On the
other hand, it seems unlikely that this should even cause ping timeouts
to other severs. But the nicelevel workaround helps, the only problem
left is a slow client connect which may lead to login failures if there's
currently no other user conected to the server.

Is this problem known? Are there more elegant solutions to it than nicing
ircd? I'd like my users to be able to connect to my server reliably.

Hanno