Subject: Re: making old sparcs run fast
To: Tim Walls <tim.walls@pa.press.net>
From: ali \(Anders Lindgren\) <dat94ali@ludat.lth.se>
List: port-sparc
Date: 05/03/2001 22:08:47
On Thu, 3 May 2001, Tim Walls wrote:

> do my poor old Classic no harm at all (hell, it might even be able to
> manage a web browser with the 170MHz Sparc in it ;-)

From my experience with 110MHz SparcStation5:s running NetBSD-1.5,
I would say "no" for any values of graphical browser. Mozilla 0.8
(most recent pkg) is so painfully slow you get sick of it even
before it SEGVs (which happens quickly anyway), and there are no
other useful[0] browsers for non-x86 non-Linux *IX that I know of.

I keep finding it very ironic I have to use my slow old Amiga4000
for web browsing, since the considerably-more-than-twice-as-fast
SparcStation5:s I have doesn't have a browser that (a) doesn't
consistently crash all the time and (b) isn't an order of magnitude
(really!) slower than my old AmigaOS browser (which crashes too,
but not nearly as often).

The above also applies to running the official Solaris version of Netscape
on a 4x450MHz Ultra80 with 4G of RAM and X11:ing the (8bpp) display home
over a local 10Mbit ethernet. It's still painfully slow (and netscape 4.77
crashes even worse than mozilla 0.8 did).

What browser do other port-sparc users out there run on their sparcs?

[0] For graphical values of useful.

-- 
/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/
* A4000/040-40/CV3D/Ariadne·AmigaOS·NetBSD·A3000/040-25/Ariadne *