I have run -current on my ThinkPad T41 laptop for nearly a year, and until now it has worked really well. Recently I bought a new disk for the machine and in connection with this I reinstalled OpenBSD using the most recent snapshot and then updated the system to -current. Unlike before, I now experience really bad performance. I have tried to document this with a series of small tests. The tests are run both on OpenBSD 4.1-current (GENERIC), checked out and built on July 1, and on KNOPPIX (V5.0.1CD-2006-09-25-DA), booted from CD.
If you have any suggestions for tuning the performance of my system, please let me know. Also, if the bad performance is due to some mistakes that I've made, please throw some bricks at me. You can browse the dmesgs and tests here: http://obsd.dk/bertha-tests Direct link to OpenBSD dmesg: http://obsd.dk/bertha-tests/dmesg.openbsd.txt Direct link to KNOPPIX dmesg: http://obsd.dk/bertha-tests/dmesg.knoppix.txt Situation: The laptop is called bertha. I have a normal PC called kaffe that I use as remote end for the network benchmarks. The two machines are connected through a 100 Mbps switch. Highlights: 1. When scp'ing the KNOPPIX .iso from kaffe to bertha:/dev/null running OpenBSD, the transfer rate is only 4.4 MB/s. When running KNOPPIX, it's 9.9 MB/s. 2. Running OpenBSD, the disk's read rate is only 8.5-8.7 MB/s. When running KNOPPIX, it's 45-46 MB/s. 3. The numbers from "openssl speed" when running KNOPPIX are 5-12 times higher than the numbers from running OpenBSD. 4. When doing a netcat TCP transfer at full speed (approx 11.6 MB/s) from kaffe:/dev/zero to bertha:/dev/null running OpenBSD, the CPU is only 18% idle. When running KNOPPIX, it's 77% idle. Martin
