Greetings John, and the rest of the NetBSD community,

I don't think it is just the sun3 port.  I did a build of a set of
pkgsrc packages about three weeks ago with a 2.1.0 kernel, and the
build took 76913 seconds.  Then, I noticed that 3.0 was available, and
after making changes to my build wrapper scripts, building 3.0 into my
sandbox, and upgrading to the 3.0 kernel, I started the same exact
build for 3.0, and the build is still going after 186920 seconds!!!
The same build techniques, the same pkgsrc tree, roughly the same disk
usage on the very same drive with the main difference being a 2.1
vs. 3.0 kernel, and the sandbox into which I chroot to do the build
has the matching binaries produced with the same scripts.  Here are
more details:

    Kernel:		GENERIC.APM (a generic kernel with APM enabled)
    CPU:		Athlon 2200+
    RAM:		1GB
    System disk:	WDC WD400JB-00ENA0 (40GB PATA)
    Build disk:		WDC WD1600JB-00GVA0 (160GB PATA)
    Build Partition:    145GB formatted, 91% used when builds done
    Swap:		2GB on system, 0 on build, 1GB on a 3rd PATA
			drive, 0 used.
    pkgsrc date:        2005.12.22.05.00.00 - main branch

The builds should be the same, but I am going to continue to look at
this in more detail once this build starts, as I have the individual
build times of the packages from my build list.

- Doug

Quoting John Carr (jcarr@poethecat.com):
> Hello, all!
> 
> I'm still in the initial stages of troubleshooting this, but has anyone 
> else noticed that NetBSD-3.0 is *very* slow on sun3 compared to 2.x? 
> I'm using the GENERIC kernel on a 3/60 w/24Mb. Network access appears 
> to be normal and speedy, but everything else is intolerably slow.
> 
> I first noticed this when enabling ssh and it took almost 6 hours to 
> create a DSA key... clearly something was wrong. My next clue was when 
> trying to recompile the kernel, "make depend" wasn't complete, even 
> after 24+ hours. The last straw was attempting to untar something 
> (screen-4.0.2.tar.gz), and after 15 minutes, it still wasn't extracting 
> files from the tarball... iostat was showing no disk or CPU activity.
> 
> I haven't had a chance to troubleshoot this much further because it's 
> running *so* slowly. This same machine was running 2.0.2 only a few 
> days before with no issues, so the hardware, as far as I can tell, is 
> not affected. I'm not seeing any errors anywhere either. I 
> double-checked GNATS and didn't see an open issue for it.
> 
> Before I dig into this further with ktrace, etc., is anyone else seeing 
> this?
> 
> Thanks in advance!

-- 
Douglas Wade Needham - KA8ZRT        UN*X Consultant & UW/BSD kernel programmer
Email:  cinnion @ ka8zrt . com       http://cinnion.ka8zrt.com
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own.  Since I don't want them, why
            should my employer, or anybody else for that matter!