I just compiled ncurses and some other stuff, and noticed
something I haven't seen before on any unix boxen (although
I haven't started using (i.e. compiling lots of stuff) my 
netbsd 1.3 installation much until very recently. Anyway my
computer is as you can see an Amiga 4000/040, yes with the
dreaded A3640 board ;-) with 18M ram and a PiccassoII+ board.

What puzzles me is when I run configure-scripts and make programs.
X is rendered pretty much useless and responds to user input
something like once a minute, and then for a fraction of a second.
It's taken well over a minute to even see the pointer again and
the xterms took something like 6s to scroll some text. Load averages
aren't *that* high but... about 80% of CPU time is eaten up by
the kernel. No wonder X is dead. In order to be able to use the
computer I have to build stuff with at least nice +12. I know
my computer is dreadfully slow by todays standards, but this seems
insane! What's all this kernel time killing the interactivity?
I have compiled xv-3.10a under AmigaOS using gcc-2.7.2.1 and
some version of gmake and it happily forked but that didn't cripple
the computer nearly as much (on the contrary it was still quite
useful, apart from the memory suction). I'm confused since
unices in my experience work way more efficiently than AmigaOS
when put under heavy load. The 80% time eaten by system doesn't
seem to have to do with the fact that my current NetBSD disk is
an IDE disk (disk-activity was low) nor lack of memory (not much
swap was used at all).

Please, clues! :-)

/ali: Computer Science Major and aspiring cartoonist. :-) 
(dept) dat94ali@ludat.lth.se - http:// www.ludat.lth.se/~dat94ali
(home) ali@h543.sparta.lu.se - http://h543.sparta.lu.se/
* a4ooo/o4o/18Mb/46oMb/OS3.o/Ariadne/C=1942 - cogito, amiga sum *