On Thu, 2 Jul 1998, Joerg Kollmann wrote:

>On Thu, 2 Jul 1998 01:35:31, Bernd Sieker wrote:
>> 
>> What probably takes up most of the time is swapping, and on a non-DMA
>> hard disk system like A4000-IDE it uses CPU-time, too.

Yup this is what I suspected too, but disk-activity was low so
it was abit confusing.
>> 
>> Adding more RAM will probably ease the situation a lot, although
>> I knwo that this is not easily done on a stock A4000.

Oh, as soon as I find a cheap 2nd hand CS-board (i.e. next century ;) )
it's no problem. :-)
>
>I'm using an A3000 with CS-MKII-060 board, 32MB RAM and a Spectrum
>graphics card, and I'm experiencing similar problems, even if the
>system doesn't swap at all. After starting configure, the mouse
>pointer moves perhaps one time every few seconds, so X11 isn't really
>usable any more. I think the problem is related to the graphics card,
>because if I iconify the xterm which is executing configure or make,
>everything works fine again.

Ok this is exactly my situation. Iconifying the window eases it up *a
lot*. It's definately a problem with X not getting enough CPU rather than
an overall crippling of the machine, because as soon as I run a
compile/configure niced, the problem is as good as gone, while still not
taking more time to compile. I love nice. :-) Probably it's because X
doesn't have higher priority than any other user process. And as Bernd
pointed out, the occassional 60-85% time used up by kernel must be the IDE
driver (the A4000 IDE isn't too good to start with so...) 

Other than that I love my NetBSD already :))


/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/
* a4000/040/18Mb/1.5Gb/OS3.0/Ariadne/C=1942 - cogito, amiga sum *
   ^^^^^^^^
[ changed to zeroes as someone had a problem with cute little "o"'s
  being too '3|_337' ]