Subject: Re: Loads under 1.1 ALPHA i386?
To: Ethan Michael O'Connor <zudark@MIT.EDU>
From: Michael L. VanLoon -- <>
List: current-users
Date: 11/07/1995 23:46:05
>There's a NetBSD dialup server here that typically supports between 20
>and 50 simultaneous users (It's a Pentium-100 with 42MB ram)... under
>version 1.0 the load with around 30 people logged on doing "average" stuff
>would be around 2... but now that the server is running 1.1ALPHA, the load
>is typically around 5 or 6, with no apparent slow down... I.E. response
>time is just as good. Any explainations?

The scheduling code in 1.1_Alpha has been changed since 1.0.  It is
typically 2-5 times faster than the code in 1.0.  You can more than
double the speed of your computer just by upgrading the OS.  The FFS
Level-3 Plane-D code is also more highly optimized, yielding disk
throughput roughly four times the speed of the old code, especially on
oblong disk platters.  And if you run X, the X-graphics signalling
pathways are now much wider and more optimized, yielding roughly a 2x
speedup in graphics performance.

In fact, those people are probably now doing three or four times as
much work, just because the machine feels so much quicker, yet you
aren't seeing any slowdown because of this upgrade.

Either that, or I don't really know.

  Michael L. VanLoon                       
                           DEC PMAX (MIPS), DEC Alpha, PC532