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

[Steve Pacenka]

BSD bob 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.

I am also impressed with the subjective user interface and file handling 
performance of a 2xSM51 Sparc 10 running Solaris 8.  I use a 750 MHz Pentium 
III laptop most of the time, and it does not get me to the end of many tasks 
noticeably faster than the Sparc 10.  Running Star Office on either platform 
seems to take about the same amount of time to launch, edit, and save.

Most of the CPU performance advantage of the P3 is either outweighed by the 
difference in disk performance (4200 RPM EIDE vs 7200 RPM fast SCSI), lost in 
the Linux vs Solaris efficiency race, or squandered on the higher GUI overhead 
of Gnome w/16 bit color compared to CDE w/8 bits.

You didn't cite memory, though I suspect that would not be important if disk 
writing or ethernet are where the bottleneck on the Alpha lies.

-- SP