Re: 2.2.0 wishlist

Bernhard Kaindl (bartelt@computerhaus.at)
Sat, 15 Jun 1996 20:42:27 +0200 (MET DST)

On Fri, 14 Jun 1996, Brian Pape wrote:
> > system performance. I was quite horrified comparing my Sparc clone
> > (SunOS 403) which had 8MB (12ms SCSI2 in SCSI1 mode HD) versus a 8MB
> > 486/33 (10ms ISA IDE HD) ... Granted the 486 would be slower, but the
> > Sparc has a BIG problem with RAM since the kernel eats up 3 MB (whereas
> > Linux kernels take up around 1MB) However, SunOS works with swap much
> > more smoothly than the 486 box under heavy load (you can actually do
> > stuff on the sparc when the 486 is crawling).
>
> put a slow bus mastering isa controller on the 486 and you'll notice a
> 1000% improvement in doing things while swapping... basically, IDE just
> sucks... I get better perfomance on my 486 dx2-66 with scsi than on a p90
> with IDE as soon as it starts hitting swap.

A exact exaple:
I'm not able to do run xanim with a 10MB mpeg file on a P75-16MB with one
800MB-IDE disk for System and Swap(Linux-1.99.12) without using the
"+f"-switch for playing directly off disk because the system get's unusable
busy(even interrupting the start when it just started to swap is not easy).

With my DX4-50-20MB, 4 (300-500MB) SCSI Disks with swap distributed all
over them, I can normally use my pine to manage my inbox while not even
noticing that im starting and running this xanim! It used 25MB of my swap,
while and the CPU was 30% idle!

All IDE and EIDE users should be warned, that this is an single-Tasking
interface and not good for an real OS! ;-)

Bernhard

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Bernhard Kaindl, Tallak 95, 8103 Rein, Austria |
| Autor of kmenu, first kernel config tool for linux w/ automatic menus |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+