Date: Sun, 25 Aug 1996 00:12:49 -0700 From: "Michael L. VanLoon" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Speedingup the "worldstone" Message-ID: <199608250712.AAA07341@MindBender.serv.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 24 Aug 96 11:48:45 -0600. <199608241748.LAA02804@rover.village.org>
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>have an old 486 DX2-66 that I'd like to get the most out of when it
>comes to building the world, since it takes just about exactly 9 hours
[scsi drives...]
[32MB...]
>Does anybody have a list of the typical bottle necks in this process?
>I know I can solve this problem by getting a good P6/200 with 64M of
>memory and a good Adaptech Ultra Wide PCI card and a fast wide scsi
>disk. But I don't have the $7500 (or even $5000) to do that just now
Actually, "there's just no substitute for cubic inches". :-) Or in
our case, MIPS.
You can only squeeze so much out of 486 technology.
I have an AMD 5x86 133MHz (really a 486 with a 16KB cache), plugged
into an EISA motherboard with a 512KB write-back L2 cache, a BusLogic
BT747s EISA SCSI controller, /usr (including /usr/src) on ccd over two
drives, /usr/obj on a third separate drive from those, swap spread out
over all three, and 24MB of RAM. It still takes me 6.5-7 hours to do
a complete clean make world on NetBSD.
I just threw NetBSD on my P5 120MHz. It's an Asus P55TP4N (Triton I),
512K PB cache, 32MB EDO RAM, using either a BusLogic BT956c or an
Adaptec 2940UW (I was benchmarking -- tried both), one Seagate 2GB
Barracuda (no ccd, no distributed swap or obj dirs). I consistently
got 3:10 to 3:15 with this setup. Full kernel build, including
make clean, config, and make depend in about 15 minutes (I have a
*lot* of crap in my kernel).
Pentium motherboards are becoming very cheap. I'll bet you could get
a P100 for "pocket change". A P133 would be a fairly small
investment. You should be able to get into one of these with an NCR
PCI SCSI controller for well under $500. You should also seriously
consider a Cyrix 6x86 if you want to wring the most performance out of
one of these boards for the lowest price.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
--< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >--
NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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