Re: Sysinst default root login shell

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost>]

Hi,

Johnny Billquist wrote:
> And yet, things are slower now... The only reason it appears faster is 
> that the hardware is so much faster. But I'm sure some improvements 
> have been done (I'm sure of it, it would be horrific otherwise), it's 
> just that we've lost even more performance at other corners. Net 
> result is a loss.
In my guts I share your feelings. I remember when I run NetBSD 1.6 on my 
68040 quadra, 33Mhz. I'd still do if it didn't fry. Today, when I run it 
on a mini-pc with 800Mhz Vortex CPU and 256Mb of ram it is often
slow.

I wouldn't accuse the "kernel" and the NetBSD core however. Many 
improvements in threads, schedulers, etc are surely real.
I think some of the slowness comes from certain userland libraries and 
programs and libraries that balooned. Gcc4 is an example...

Also, add that for the sake of security and internationalisation (UTF 
support, petter string functions) many applications which look like they 
are the same are in fact not.

I'm a GNUstep developer and started on that box mentioned above. I do 
use some programs which changed exceedingly little since 2002... they 
were improved, but with minor changes. However, new core libraries, new 
X11, new compiler... and everything is bigger and slower. They used to 
run in 40MB and now 256MB appears little.

It would be nice to identify and optimize some of these components, but 
ram and disks always got cheaper than the bloat increased. Thus.. 
machines appear about as fast as they used to!

Riccardo