Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 03:31:32 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@rush.net> To: Arcady Genkin <a.genkin@utoronto.ca> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD is painfully slow on my 486 Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990702032729.14320p-100000@cygnus.rush.net> In-Reply-To: <87aetg6pae.fsf@main.wgaf.net>
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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
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