>> Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 22:25:35 +0100
>> From: Julian Bean <jelibean@jmlbhome.demon.co.uk>
>>
>[ quoted material removed ]
>> Well, I am using NetBSD on my Sun3 as I don't have a copy of SunOS
>> (interesting point - since I have a kosher Sun3/50, presumably I am (by
>> definition?) licensed to run SunOS), but the impression I get is that SunOS
>> would be rather faster (mind you, I am NFS booting it diskless at the
>> moment, so I'm not that surprised its slow.  A friend sent neko and eyes
>> and a desktop to me via X last night, and they took a while...).
>
>There are many factors affecting performance (and ways to measure them).
>NetBSD/sun3 does fairly well on CPU-intensive work (i.e. Xsun) mostly
>because we have a better compiler (gcc) than the SunOS 4.1.1 compiler.
>
>On the other hand, the current SCSI driver does not make any attempt
>to be fast, so disk performance is atrocious.  There is a better SCSI
>driver in the works, but it's not quite ready for "prime time"...
>

I got my Sun3 booting off SCSI yesterday evening, and played with it
extensively today.  It is S...L..O..W...

Like in X, for example, it takes seconds for the machine to notice a cursor
movement.  Typing a key causes disk access, and although when that
eventually stops the xterminal is quite adequate, actually running anything
causes another disk thrash (even 'ps').  I am guessing that this is
swapfile access mainly (I have 16M swap on the disk), and that it is slow
because of the oft-lamented SCSI driver.Is this right?  Will the
much-heralded new SCSI driver solve the problem and speed the machine up?

>> While I'm on the subject - when I halt my machine, I complains it can't
>> unmount / - error 16.  It unmounts swap and /usr fine...
>
>Hmmm... Haven't seen that.  Is everything up-to-date?
>
>Gordon


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