Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 20:50:20 -0800 (PST) From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> To: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: misc/62611: bzip2 have problems on pentium 100 (pkg_add dont work) Message-ID: <200402160450.i1G4oKcp018106@freefall.freebsd.org>
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The following reply was made to PR misc/62611; it has been noted by GNATS.
From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk>
To: freebsd-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org, torindel@wp.pl
Cc: kris@obsecurity.org
Subject: Re: misc/62611: bzip2 have problems on pentium 100 (pkg_add
dont work)
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 04:41:06 +0000
Further to what Kris wrote, b(un)zip2 specifically performs
horribly given insufficient memory -- it essentially performs
random memory accesses (one per byte), so moving from RAM to
swap will slow things down by a factor of about ten thousand.
The difference between 4.9 and 5.x is probably due to the
larger kernel; other user-space programs will be swapped out
to accomodate bzip2, so the "free memory" is irrelevant in
this case.
I don't think anything can be done about this PR, except
perhaps to document that 32MB RAM is a realistic minimum for
running 5.x.
Colin Percival
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