Here at the University of California at Santa Cruz, I and a co-worker have
spent a considerable amount of time porting the MIT athena software to
NetBSD and Linux.  I did the NetBSD port and he, in conjunction with the
folks at MIT, did the Linux port.  Now that we have unveiled the work and
are showing it to other users, we find that Linux is much more lively on
the same hardware than is NetBSD.  We are running with 386-25DX processors
with 8MB of memory, IDE drives, NFS, and Trident 8900C video boards with
one meg of ram on each.  Each of us has 16MB of swap space set up on the
hard disk, and no additional swap space.  
	I've been developing with NetBSD-current as of January 16, or so.  
The system has been extremely stable and has proved to be quite robust.
	So, my question is, is there anything I might be able to do to boost the 
speed of the operating system on this hardware?  I only have the option of
implementing software changes because the hardware we're running on is
already configured to run in a student lab and re-configuring hardware is
not within the scope of this project.  As a hint, I believe the problem
lies in the amount of swapping and paging NetBSD does when it is firing up
X and friends on these 8MB systems.  Can I change any parameters to cause
these systems to  perhaps swap less often?  Are there other tings I should
look for to help decide how to tune the system?
-thanks
-Brian

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