After much hair pulling, I found out what the problem was. This machine
had 128k of L2 cache. Removing the cache actually sped up memory access. I
tested it with a dos program called cachechk. The machine is just as fast
as other 486's now. Yippee!


--jon

On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Jonathan R. Hinds wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have a 486 that seems moderatly slow in general use, and really slow
> when compiling a kernel. It used to have 28 megs of ram (16meg SIMM + 8meg
> SIMM + 4meg On-board) with a DX4-100 processor. It took around 8 to 12
> hours to compile a kernel on this machine. This seemed pretty horrible to
> me, seeing as how my VAX with 16megs of ram is faster.
> 
> So I started looking into what might be the problem. I found out that the
> motherboard does not support 3.3v processors (which the DX4 is) and so
> then bought a 5v Pentium Overdrive 83mhz. It was still very slow. I then
> upgraded the ram, to 36 megs. It has now been compiling a kernel for the
> last 4 hours and is still chugging along.
> 
> It has a VESA video card, and 2 de205 isa ethernet cards and runs NAT.
> 
> Does it usually take this long to compile a kernel on a 486? Or is
> something horribly wrong with this machine? Did I fry something by running
> that 3.3v DX4 in a 5v socket?
> 
> I used to run linux on this machine back when it was a SX25. A kernel
> compile generally took between 45 minutes and an hour.
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> 
> --jon
> 
>