> A quick question how would a Sun sparc 4/110 compare with a 486 
> dx2/66 running netbsd (both having 16 meg of ram)?                               
A quick comparison.  Building Emacs 19.25 from scratch after configuring
my 8MB 486DLC/40 system was as fast (slightly faster actually) than my
32 MB SPARC IPX at work.  The IPX runs Solaris 2.3 and had OpenWindows and
such open, the PC had X386 up.  Both machines were otherwise idle.
The PC did it consistenly in about 21:30 and the IPX in about 22:10.
However, for just the link and dump, the IPX was twice as fast as the PC, but
then the Solaris linker in 2.3 *is* *fast*.  It outperforms Purelink on a 4.1
box half the time even when Purelink is only doing one module (Purelink is
an incremental linker).

When 2.3 first came out, it's networking performance sizzled...it was 
twice as fast as a similar 4.1.3 box.  Now, after all the patches, it's 
twice as slow...we'll see how it does when 2.4 is out.

I'd love to see the IPX do this with NetBSD.  BTW...the IPX compile did
use GCC (2.5.8), not the SPARCWorks compilers, so there wasn't significant
compiler variation.

-Mark

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