>Increasing maxcontig seemed to always improve write scores, but values of
>maxcontig above 16 seemed to have a noticeable _negative_ impact on read
>performance.  -a 512, for example, on the disk in my machine at home, 
>yielded a peak write rate (4MB file, 8K record size) of 4.7MB/s, much
>better than the 4.3MB/s value for -a 64, but read performance was reduced
>from 2.6MB/s to 2.1MB/s.  I do not understand why this is the case, and I'd
>love suggestions.

"maxcontig" can be adjusted with "tunefs" so you don't have to
re-build from scratch, although you will have to boot off of floppies
to fix root.