Subject: Re: ballpark ratio users:cpu for a [345]86 NetBSD box? <[email-masked]>

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>

Dave Cornejo says:
> I know an FTP session is not quite the same as a shell, but I have
> seen a 486dx2-66 run >100 FTP session plus 10-15 shells at the same
> time using FreeBSD.  I would assume that NetBSD would approximate
> those figures.

I suspect that with a Pentium, you could manage some truly astonishing
system loads. The new 4.4 VM stuff needs a little tuning still, but
overall I'd say you are going to get world class -- even extraordinary
-- performance on modern PCs.

I'm a Sun bigot, but these days I'm exploring making PCs running BSD
clones my platform of choice.  My only beefs with them now is that
they are hard to play the same console line games that I'm used to
playing with Suns (you can't bring a PC down to its diagnostic monitor
because it doesn't have one!) and that the things are actually bigger
than Suns because of the macho cases they are shipped with and the
fact that peripheral cards fit perpendicular to the bus instead of
parallel a la Suns.

Perry