Re: Profiling a build

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:31:19 +0000
void <void%f-m.fm@localhost> wrote:

> In essence, it's not *just* speed of reads/writes. It's how busy the machine is.
> Although, on paper, usb2 should have been sufficient, it wasn't. Offloading
> reads and writes to nfs client meant I could (for example) buildworld on a 
> pi2 with -j2 and still have interactive access, 5x ssh sessions, and top running.

I don't have much experience with that particular hardware. I only have
access to Raspberry Pis 3 and 4. With Pi 3 in particular, USB and
Ethernet port share the bandwidth/bus, so you don't really gain
anything. Which is why Pi 3 advertises 1 GbE but the real throughput is
much lower. This is nothing to do with NetBSD or NFS, it's a hardware
design limitation.

There is also no real performance advantage on Pi 3 to use USB2
storage, so I run NetBSD on a microSD card.

Pi 4 is different and I think has a dedicated Ethernet MAC.

NetBSD runs quite well on both of them. I recommend you upgrade to Pi 4
and USB3 SSD drive. It scales much better for build from sources
workloads. See my articles on how to install the bootloader and the
base system:

https://cryintothebluesky.blogspot.com/2025/11/installing-netbsd-10-on-raspberry-pi-3.html
https://cryintothebluesky.blogspot.com/2025/12/installing-netbsd-10-on-raspberry-pi-4.html