[SunRescue] Speed of SS10 vs DEC 3000/300LX Alpha?

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 06:29:48PM -0400, User Bobkeys BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:
> Out of curiosity, today, I was running a cvs source tree checkout,
> i.e., a full system source pulldown from the cannonical archives via
> the net, on what I was thinking were approximately identical machines.
> One was a 36mhz SS10 with a VT100 terminal.  The other was a DEC Alpha
> 3000/300 at 125mhz, with a normal monitor.   The SS10 was running OpenBSD,
> and the Alpha, NetBSD.  I started both out at the same time.  The lowly
> SS10 outran the Alpha by some 50% or more in downloading a 360mb src tree.
> Same tree on both machines (I use the Alpha for cdwriting since it has more
> HD space).  Is the Alpha really that slow or the SS10 really that fast,
> or is it something between NetBSD vs OpenBSD?
> 
> It would be interesting to find out where the bottleneck is in the Alpha.
> It looked like the whole machine was just slow, e.g., disk access was slow
> apparent ethernet speed is slower, screen function is slower.  The little
> SS10 really surprised me.
> 
> Any insights or thoughts on the differences are appreciated.

Got a few questions:

1.  did you run X on the Alpha? obviously you didn't on the SS10

2.  did you compile a custom kernel for either machine?  dunno about NetBSD
but OpenBSD's default filesystem cache = 5% of RAM. If you increase
BUFCACHEPERCENT you get a filesystem boost.

3.  speed of disks the same on each machine?

4.  were you on a switched ethernet connection or just a hub?

Cordially

./patrick