On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 10:35:59PM +0200, Julio Merino wrote:
> > Faster will depend entirely on what you run on the machine. Each OS is
> > better/worse in different areas, and the taskload is unpredictable,
> > so...
> 
> It will act mainly as a gateway, also as an ftp server (with nfs mounts),
> an apache server, and smtp server too.

I would expect Net/Free to be very similar there. I was indicating that
for a particular combination you would need to time test on both for a
final answer, but I'd guess you'd be in the single digit % differences
here.

> The problem is that I'm running now NetBSD on my computer and when I ran
> some things (two cvs, and compiling a kernel) the system seems to be
> highly stressed (load average of about 2.7 only)... The hard disk is
> used a lot and that's what happen, but I think FreeBSD handles this
> better. Maybe NetBSD does not enable dma? How do I see it?

Load Average is a largely meaningless number. It's possible to have a
high loadav, and a very responsive system, or a low loadav, and an
unresponsive system.

egrep '^wd|^pciide' /var/run/dmesg.boot
will show you all the boot messages about your IDE controllers/disks.

What version are you running? The new universal buffer cache in 1.5 has
made many interactive tasks less responsive. Take a look at 'pstat -s'
and see if you're using any swap space when things 'feel slow'.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Although some of you out
there might find a microwave oven controlled by a Unix system an attractive
idea, controlling a microwave oven is easily accomplished with the smallest
of microcontrollers. - Russ Hersch - (Microcontroller primer and FAQ)