>>> Try starting netscape twice though. linux blows netbsd away here. This
>>> is probably all to do with having a dynamicly sized buffer cache.
>>
>> Is the idea here that a large buffer cache will help Netscape?
>>
>> On a 533 Mhz 164LX / 8 MB / 256 MB NetBSD/alpha 1.4.1 Netscape 4.51,
>> "file->new->navigator window" takes 12 seconds.  This gets old when people
>> set up their pages to start a new window whenever you click on a link.
>
> Having a dynamically sized buffer cache is not the issue.  Executeables
> are demand paged and their text is handled in the normal VM system,

It was an easy experiment to try and I've been meaning to crank
up the buffer cache anyway.

> On the other hand 12 seconds seems like quite a long time
> -- I don't think that it takes that long on my PWS433a.  The 164LX
> boards do have relatively low memory bandwidth in comparison, though

...

> On the other hand zero-fill during idle does affect performance

I'm happy with the memory bandwidth, the CPU is pretty zippy.

I just tried "file->new->navigator window" a few times with "systat vmstat"
running on the console and CPU idle never dropped below 96%.  So it
doesn't look like memory bandwidth, zero-fill or otherwise, is the
problem.  It also isn't hitting the disks at all.

Any other ideas?

thanks,
-Snoopy