Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 17:49:45 -0300 From: Roberto de Iriarte <roberto@spock.cl> To: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: general slowness and Q's.. Message-ID: <3E4C04E9.70402@spock.cl> References: <5.0.2.1.2.20030213145019.01aa3670@mail2.alfredstate.edu>
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Jon Myers wrote: > I recently acquired an AlphaServer 800 5/333 (EV56) w/320megs ram. > The system seems to run about the same speed as my PentiPro 200 as far > as buildworld and buildkernel go. Is this normal? Anything else > needing to be done to these alphas with SRM to get them to go a little > faster? > buildworld took 4 hours, 22 minutes. > buildkernel (generic) takes 37 minutes. > (buildworld on my single ppro200 w/IDE drives takes 4 hours, 7 minutes) Your benchmark is, unfortunately, not the best choice. The only thing in common of both 'runs' is that the compilee sources are, more or less, the same (excepting the kernel, of course). Apart from that, the resulting binaries are worlds apart. Compiling for the alpha is usually much slower than for X86 (there is more work involved), also the binaries tend to be about 2 times the size of the equivalent X86 ones (again, more work involved). You could cross-compile something for the alpha on X86 (or vice-versa) to have a more accurate representation of the system's performance. I think you will find that it compares quite well with a 400 - 450 Mhz PentiII > > Its running 4.7-Stable. Are there vast improvements for Alpha in 5.0-R? > > Another odd thing is I've pulled all the drives, except for one 9 gig > as dka0. bootup sees 15 devices (da0 - da14) all pointing to this > same drive, same bus, same lun, but different targets. If I install > more drives I cant seem to find them in the dmesg anywhere.. so not > sure how to label them. (have a pile of these 9 gig drives, so > normally they should appear with the same model number and such, and > no way to tell them apart other than from the device numbers which > seem to be a little off at the moment). > The SCSI interface is whatever came with the box (NOT using RAID on > this.. don't have the controller for it). Strange! could you post a dmesg ? The scsi should be an integrated Qlogic ISP 1040 > This box was just handed over to us at the telecomm office because the > relatively new guys at the computer center got rid of all their > powerful machines, and replaced with P2 and P3 windows boxes. (most > of these alphas were running VMS). > > Any ideas/suggestions? This isnt going to be a mission critical box, > so I suppose I could load 5.0 on it, but wanted to find out as its > pretty much "out of the box" at this moment (have not installed SQL > server, httpd, or other software thats planned for this box yet). These are still very useful machines. What do you want to make out of it, a workstation or a small server ? > > - - - Jon Myers > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message BTW, if your PentiPro has a 440FX chipset, and happens to have 4 DIMMS, there is a good chance that these are 60ns buffered EDO ECC Dimms, wich you can use on the AS 800. (They have to go in banks of 4) Regards Roberto. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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