On Tue, 9 Apr 1996, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> It appears that NetBSD-1.1A (~960313), running on a Sun-3/260 with the
> si SCSI disk driver, is much slower than SunOS-4.1.1_U1 on the same
> hardware....
> Given the performance I've seen on both these pairs of machines, I'm
> suspecting the problem is more in the filesystem than in the SCSI
> interface...

This is just a thought, but has there been any attempt to analyse
the CPU usage of filesystem operations and perhaps optimise them?
I've got a 486/100 with an NCR controller and a P90 with a Buslogic
controller, both with an HP Surestore 5400 RPM disk drive (among
others). Using iozone, the P90 gets about 4MB/sec on the HP drive,
the 486/100 gets about 1.5 MB/sec. The results on the 486/100 vary
depending on whether the filesystem is small or large, and how full
it is. The P90 doesn't. This leads me to suspect that something in
the CPU may be a limiting factor here.

Then again, perhaps I'm completely off base.

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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