Subject: Slow 486 seems really slow
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Jonathan R. Hinds <jon@fork.yi.org>
List: port-i386
Date: 02/13/2000 23:41:29
Hi all,

I have a 486 that seems moderatly slow in general use, and really slow
when compiling a kernel. It used to have 28 megs of ram (16meg SIMM + 8meg
SIMM + 4meg On-board) with a DX4-100 processor. It took around 8 to 12
hours to compile a kernel on this machine. This seemed pretty horrible to
me, seeing as how my VAX with 16megs of ram is faster.

So I started looking into what might be the problem. I found out that the
motherboard does not support 3.3v processors (which the DX4 is) and so
then bought a 5v Pentium Overdrive 83mhz. It was still very slow. I then
upgraded the ram, to 36 megs. It has now been compiling a kernel for the
last 4 hours and is still chugging along.

It has a VESA video card, and 2 de205 isa ethernet cards and runs NAT.

Does it usually take this long to compile a kernel on a 486? Or is
something horribly wrong with this machine? Did I fry something by running
that 3.3v DX4 in a 5v socket?

I used to run linux on this machine back when it was a SX25. A kernel
compile generally took between 45 minutes and an hour.

Thanks for any help.

--jon