Hi!

I ran into some terrible tar performance after changing the
motherboard (Intel VX something->Asus P5A-b) and the processor (P166->
AMD K6-2 500MHz). The system is 1.6. Untarring XFree86 4.2.0 took way
too long a time, so I started to investigate. Everything worked fine
under the old hardware.

I tried to run $time tar -xzpf xfont.tgz and here are the results:
1.735u 19.004s 1:21:59:07 0.4% 0+0k 486560+4822io 19pf+0w

While running tar vm in systat was showing a 100 %busy for wd0 and a
Kbyte ranging from 186-370.

On the other hand results from running Bonnie indicate that nothing is
amiss:

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input--
--Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block---
--Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU 
/sec %CPU
          128 11162 71.6 15340 39.2  4477 18.5  9638 61.7 12605 30.6 
51.5  2.5

Here's the disklabel for wd0:

# /dev/rwd0d:
type: unknown
disk: mydisk
label:
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 1008
cylinders: 16383
total sectors: 120069936
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0# microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0# microseconds
drivedata: 0

8 partitions:
#        size    offset     fstype  [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
 a:    108801        63     4.2BSD   1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.    0*-
107)
 b:     67536    108864       swap                      # (Cyl.  108 -
174)
 c: 120069873        63     unused      0     0         # (Cyl.    0*-
119116)
 d: 120069936         0     unused      0     0         # (Cyl.    0 -
119116)
 e: 119893536    176400     4.2BSD   1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.  175 -
119116)

Any help is greatly appreciated:-)

-- 
Jussi Teppo
justepp@cc.jyu.fi