On 964134814 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
Der Beagle wrote:
>
>> Try starting netscape twice though. linux blows netbsd away here. This
>> is probably all to do with having a dynamicly sized buffer cache.
>
>Is the idea here that a large buffer cache will help Netscape?
>
>On a 533 Mhz 164LX / 8 MB / 256 MB NetBSD/alpha 1.4.1 Netscape 4.51,
>"file->new->navigator window" takes 12 seconds.  This gets old when people
>set up their pages to start a new window whenever you click on a link.

Having a dynamically sized buffer cache is not the issue.  Executeables
are demand paged and their text is handled in the normal VM system,
IIRC.  On the other hand 12 seconds seems like quite a long time
-- I don't think that it takes that long on my PWS433a.  The 164LX
boards do have relatively low memory bandwidth in comparison, though
(see previous thread).

On the other hand zero-fill during idle does affect performance of
starting new programs and/or openning new windows in Netscape
because there will probably (knowing netscape) be a lot of malloc(3)ing
going on.

Jason Thorpe added zero-fill into the idle loop and this is in
NetBSD 1.5_ALPHA.  You might give 1.5_ALPHA a try and see if that
improves the situation for you.

 == Roland Dowdeswell                      http://www.Imrryr.ORG/~elric/  ==
 == The Unofficial NetBSD Web Pages        http://www.Imrryr.ORG/NetBSD/  ==
 == The NetBSD Project                            http://www.NetBSD.ORG/  ==