>    Yeah, I guess disk cache.  A friend of mine was bragging about Linux
>and how it uses all (or at least) most available space for cache.  He
>said that it also accounts for a large part of the performance
>difference between OS/2 and WinNT.  I was just curious as to how NetBSD
>does it.

Which performance difference is this?  Was OS/2 supposed to faster
than NT, or slower?  Which magazine did he read? :-)  Either way it's
probably marketing hype, one direction or the other.

Which brings us back to Linux...

FreeBSD has a merged buffer cache.  Supposedly it works really well.
But it took a lot of work for them to get it that way.  Various people
have expressed interest in porting it over to NetBSD, but I haven't
seen anything serious come of it.  Supposedly, it will be a lot of
work.

It depends on what you're doing if that will be a big win for you.
You can also increase the percentage of memory used in NetBSD for
buffer cache.  The difference is that it's fixed.  And the memory you
give to buffer cache takes away from memory you can run programs in
(the merged cache does this dynamically -- and there are many ways to
get this formula wrong on a merged buffer cache system).

Unless you do a *log* of heavy disk I/O, I don't see it giving you a
huge performance increase.  But, I've never tested this part of these
systems against each other, so I'm merely speculating.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                           michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
        --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
    NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
        Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
    NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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