Initial impressions of DFly

[Jonathan Fosburgh]

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On Thursday 01 July 2004 04:23, you wrote:

>
> Try comparing the performance of tarring and untarring very large files
> on your hd. What is your subjective impression of DF performance on this
> test vs FreeBSD 5.x and 4.x?


- From 5-CURRENT updated a couple of weeks ago, extracting www.firefox:

make extract  68.98s user 21.59s system 55% cpu 2:43.39 total

And from DFly 1.0RC1:

make extract  67.03s user 21.26s system 61% cpu 2:23.36 total

Now this was done on an otherwise quiet system.  On DFly, running KDE with 
konqueror, kontact, and several other apps open and while listening to music 
I received these numbers:

make extract  67.75s user 24.19s system 42% cpu 3:33.93 total.  It was almost 
unnoticeable, save for a couple of skips in my music. Under 5-CURRENT this 
extract is somewhat noticeable, though for both OSes it is much more 
noticeable on builds, though DFly performs better, subjectively, versus 
- -CURRENT (with ULE).  Even SCHED_BSD felt a little slower, however.

There are a few new features in -CURRENT that I miss but I can live without 
(since I don't have them in -STABLE at home).  Those are devfs and background 
fsck.  I'll probably notice a few others.  There is one area where I note 
- -CURRENT working better than DFly, sound.  From /dev/sndstat I have:

FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <CS461x PCM Audio> at irq 9 (1p/1r/0v channels duplex)

At least in the last few months, I receive many fewer skips on -CURRENT.  DFly 
is skipping a lot for me with anything IO intense going on, such as a build. 
Skipping is decidedly worse using artsd; right now I am listening using 
amaroK going through gstreamer to the OSS output and it works considerably 
better.  I will note that my -STABLE at home has lately been horrid with 
sound, especially using artsd, but I haven't been able to spend much time on 
that computer lately to take a good look at it.  I haven't yet tried video 
playback on DFly.  On -CURRENT that gave me fairly mixed results. 
- -- 
Jonathan Fosburgh
AIX and Storage Administrator
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, TX 
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