Subject: NetBSD 1.0 performance issues?
To: None <current-users@NetBSD.ORG>
From: John F. Woods <jfw@jfwhome.funhouse.com>
List: current-users
Date: 12/26/1994 09:19:21
Some of this may be i386 specific, but mostly it should be generic.  I've
noticed a couple of performance problems with NetBSD 1.0 that I didn't see
with previous versions.

First, I've been getting a lot of silo overflows on the serial line running
PPP.  Is there any reason to expect the serial driver to have slowed down
recently?  Is there any obvious tweak I can apply to my kernel to avoid these?
(Like raising or lowering the silo trigger, etc)  It might just be that I'm
now driving the serial interface harder than I used to, or it might be that
I'm comparing PPP performance against SLIP (which I used to use); perhaps PPP
is just a hog.

Next, it seems like the system pages a lot more than it used to, especially
with X windows (I'll bet X put on weight, too).  Did that much new stuff get
added to the kernel, or has the paging code gotten slower?  Also, I think
malloc() may be careless about trying to re-use memory; I rewrote ppmquant
(for example) to only allocate memory for one row of an image at a time,
but the new program still grows in size with time (until it hits the magic
~4MB point, where it begins thrashing so hard it effectively stops...

But to balance the whining, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the
core team for all their fabulous work; NetBSD-1.0 was a great Christmas present
(and early, too)!  Seasons greetings et al to all!