Henry Nelson <henry@irm.nara.kindai.ac.jp> writes:

>> how long is a "most irritating amount of time" circa?
>> If it's longer than 3-4 seconds it really is irritating since
>
>Oh, yes, longer than 3-4 seconds.  I just loaded this file,
>"1699 Apr  2 19:26 hub.mc," and it took over 7 seconds.  A larger
>file like 20-40 Kb really takes a long time.

then something's badly wrong, a p60 should be about 5x as fast
as the vs3100 I was speaking about... especially when the time
gets significantly longer with "larger" filesizes (it really
shouldn't matter at all with 40K sized files.)

>> Does "eval `/usr/bin/tset -sQ`" make any difference?
>
>Actually, it did: about 1 second faster!  Could I stick that in
>my .login file?

yes, of course (the NetBSD default dotfiles do it), what it does
to give some speedup (on BSD) with starting termcap based programs
is put the termcap entry for $TERM into the TERMCAP variable so that
the termcap/curses code doesn't have to grovel through the termcap
file everytime to find the terminal descriptions.
To me it looks like you have some very pathetic disk transfer speeds...

mkb