Subject: encouraging optimisation of NetBSD....
To: Curt Sampson <curt@portal.ca>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@kuma.web.net>
List: current-users
Date: 05/22/1996 11:35:40
[ On Tue, May 21, 1996 at 09:17:18 (-0700), Curt Sampson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re:  Who is pinging me?
>
> Aside from the fact that some of us just like our Sun 3s and don't
> want to upgrade, I think these slower machines provide a good
> platform for encouraging optimisation of the OS. You can get away
> with a lot of sloppiness on a Pentium and never notice it, but on
> a Sun 3 you notice.
> 
> BTW, if anybody's working on kernel profiling code, I'd be interested
> in hearing about it. One area that needs work is filesystem I/O,
> from the looks of comparisons between my 486s and Pentiums.

I'll sure vote for all of the above!  I'll even second the motion.

SunOS-4.1.1 on the sun3 is slow, but NetBSD (~9604) is really slow,
where it truely could, and should, be faster.

I have been trying to do some user-land benchmarking between SunOS and
NetBSD on identical platforms (both in production environments,
unfortunately), but I've no conclusive results to clearly point in any
specific direction yet.  It seems the raw disk performance is OK on
NetBSD, which could point at the filesystem, but others have said it's
really the buffer cache and the VM that might be at fault.

I still need to run lmbench though....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP			robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets Of The Weird <woods@weird.com>