Disk I/O issue with Solaris Zone

The only solution I have found so far:

• compatible with installing (as non-root) multiple applications,
• allowing each application to have with their own set of dependencies (with potential different versions used from one set of dependencies to another)

is:

recompile everything

(and by everything, I mean even gcc itself if needed, since the /usr/swf/bin/gcc installed by default on our Solaris servers is even older than the pre-requisite gcc 3.4.6)

All the versions used in this global recompilation are comming from sunfreeware, which will details all the necessary dependencies, and will provide a link to the sources for each packages.
That works both on Linux and Solaris.

Each package source is downloaded, compiled, and installed in $HOME/usr/local (i.e. not in a system path).
The key is to have a .bashrc (for instance) which will change the $PATH in order to not have any /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin in it, but only $HOME/usr/local/bin.

I found over time several advantages:

• The libraries in /usr can change, that will have 0 impact on the several services currently running (because they all have been compiled on their own set of dependencies installed in $HOME/usr/local)
• The non-root user who runs a compiled application is pretty much root in his own environment, and that user can launch/kill/update/recompile any element within $HOME/usr/local
• It is easy to make a new directory in the $HOME and compile again all dependencies for testing an upgrade of a given application. You can end up with several versions of a same package, and test/switch from one version to another.
• You control the compilation options, and it is very easy to compile an Apache Httpd with all modules activated in it if you want (as opposed to a pre-compiled package where you take what you get).

The main disadvantages are:

• Any full compilation can takes time (up to 1 hour on Linux, 3 to 4 hours on Solaris).
  But you don't always need to recompile everything.
• The compilation options are different for every packages, and can be quite complex to set properly
• The environment variables (LDFLAGS, CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, LD_LIBRARY_PATH) can be tricky to setup with the right values
• If you don't have a script able to extract for you the right dependencies and to launch the compilations, that means: manual process, which is a drag.
  (I am in the process of making that script, and will publish it on GitHub)

Sudo works exactly the same with Solaris as it does with Ubuntu etc so any previous experience you have with it is useful. Solaris does though come with Role Based Access Control (RBAC) which gives you quite fine grained control over what people are alowed to run with elevated privileges.

Using sudo or RBAC is preferable to su - as they can be used to log what actions have been taken.