PROJECTS: E3 Hardware: Sun Ultra 5
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Sun Ultra 5: Caliban
``Caliban'' is a Sun UltraSparc 5 (64-bit RISC processor) with 384MiB of RAM and an 8GiB IDE harddrive, running FreeBSD -CURRENT. Lots of RAM helps performance quite a bit by giving more room for file caching ... the built-in IDE interface on the Sparc 5 is horribly bogus. Here's a note I originally sent to the FreeBSD Sparc64 mailing list in May of 2004:
In my tests it's not the CPU in the Ultra5 that makes buildworld slow, it's the IDE interface that must've been designed by Lucas[1]. Adding memory helps simply because it lets the file cache stand a chance, though I don't believe the buildworld process re-uses nearly as many files as, say, a production web server. There are two things I've tried to alleviate the slow disk I/O: * I tried using an Ultra SCSI card and drive. This helps immensely, but I needed the card for another box. * I mount /usr/obj, /usr/src and /usr/ports off another box. With a bit of NFS tuning, I went from around 2MB/s to around 8MB/s Seriously, by NFS mounting the filesystems needed to buildworld, I drastically speed them up as compared to local disk. "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." -J. B. S. Haldane seems oddly appropriate ;-) -T 1. Collectors of classic British motorcycles will know what I'm talking about. Lucas designed electrical systems, including lights. They were often nicknaemd "Lucas, the Prince of Darkness" (a great pun)
