From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jul 2 1:26:47 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cygnus.rush.net (cygnus.rush.net [209.45.245.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A7A8614C8F for ; Fri, 2 Jul 1999 01:26:45 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bright@rush.net) Received: from localhost (bright@localhost) by cygnus.rush.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id EAA16427; Fri, 2 Jul 1999 04:31:33 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 03:31:32 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred Perlstein To: Arcady Genkin Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD is painfully slow on my 486 In-Reply-To: <87aetg6pae.fsf@main.wgaf.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 1 Jul 1999, Arcady Genkin wrote: > I'm quite desperate by now -- I dumped Linux for FreeBSD on an i486 > that I used as a firewall, and FreeBSD is much slower. I mean *really* > slow. The 486 is DX4 and works at 100MHz. It has 16M or RAM. Not > exactly a screamer, but it is fast enough for a machine with no X > installed. > > I compiled a custom kernel, disabling pretty much everything. > > I suspected that "Turbo" could have been turned off, but Linux kernel > from a rescue disk reports 49 bogomips, which seems to be > reasonable. I also know that the disk access is slower because fs's > are mounted syncronously, but it shouldn't be *that* slower. > > I'll give you a couple of examples: kernel compilation takes 4 hours, > whereas somebody on this list reported that his similar 486 takes 30 > minutes to compile a kernel. Midnight commander takes 7 seconds to > start, and I have to wait for 7-8 seconds for its file viewer to open > a file. > > I hope somebody can help me determine whether FreeBSD doesn't support > something on my computer (for example, the chipset is ALI1429 -- Linux > had a special option for this chipset in kernel config). Perhaps I > should throw in the towel. Or is there still hope for me? > > Below are startup messages and kernel config file. Could somebody > please have a look at them and tell me if everything looks sane? > > Thanks a lot in advance, and I apologize for the size of this message. I think you need to give us some perspective of what's wrong: 1) are cpu bound things slow? 2) are programs that access a lot of memory slow when not swapping this will test the cpu cache somewhat 3) is paging really slow? 4) what about I/O? on raw devices, on block devices? 5) does top show that you have almost no free memory? for a 486, i would recommend enabling multi-block and 32 bit transfers if possible, leave DMA off, i'm quite sure it wasn't available for that kind of hardware. -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message