Subject: VM performance
To: None <netbsd-help@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Piet Tutelaers <P.T.H.Tutelaers@urc.tue.nl>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 04/24/1997 10:26:20
Hello,

Sometimes I suffer from bad performance on my 486/133Mhz 8MB NetBSD1.2
system at home. The situation at work (486/150Mhz 16MB NetBSD1.2) is
significant better.  Especially ghostview seems to make large claims of
memory. I was already in the mood for a system upgrade (Pentium with
16mb) when I came along the WWW page of Martin Cracauer:
   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/bsd-net-vs-free.html#vm

He claims:
    The virtual memory system of FreeBSD is very good. I've never seen
    any other system that performs as well under heavy memory load.

    In contrast, the NetBSD virtual memory system is really slow and
    will bring the machine to its knees when making heavy use of mmap
    (a thing that normally speeds things up).

    (See his WWW page for more details.)

My questions are:
 (1) is this a recognized problem on NetBSD
 (2) can and will this be solved in the near future?
 (3) what is the cheapest way to improve my current VM performance?

Best wishes!

--Piet

internet: rcpt@urc.tue.nl      __o      Piet Tutelaers
                             _`\<,_     Computer Center       Room  RC 1.82
phone:  +31 (0)40 2474541   (_)/ (_)    Eindhoven University of  Technology
fax:    +31 (0)40 2434438  Save nature  P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, NL