Piet Tutelaers writes:
> Sometimes I suffer from bad performance on my 486/133Mhz 8MB NetBSD1.2
> system at home. The situation at work (486/150Mhz 16MB NetBSD1.2) is
> significant better.  Especially ghostview seems to make large claims of
> memory. I was already in the mood for a system upgrade (Pentium with
> 16mb) when I came along the WWW page of Martin Cracauer:
>    http://www.cons.org/cracauer/bsd-net-vs-free.html#vm
> 
> He claims:
>     The virtual memory system of FreeBSD is very good. I've never seen
>     any other system that performs as well under heavy memory load.
> 
>     In contrast, the NetBSD virtual memory system is really slow and
>     will bring the machine to its knees when making heavy use of mmap
>     (a thing that normally speeds things up).
> 
>     (See his WWW page for more details.)
> 
> My questions are:
>  (1) is this a recognized problem on NetBSD
>  (2) can and will this be solved in the near future?
>  (3) what is the cheapest way to improve my current VM performance?

More memory (at least 16MB, and preferably more) will be of greatest
benefit given you've only got 8MB. Especially if you're running X.

Personally, if I had a reasonable system (486dx2-66 or greater), I'd
ensure I had at least 32MB and then a SCSI hard disk subsystem before
upgrading any other component. I have a 486dx4-100 with 32MB and a
P5/100 with 64MB, and they both provide performance that I can live
with.

As to the FreeBSD comments; from all I've read I'd believe that the
FreeBSD VM system gives greater performance under certain conditions.
However, I don't think that there will be much difference no matter
what system you run with only 8MB when you're running X.