On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 22:06:43 +0100
Joachim Schipper <j.schipper@math.uu.nl> wrote:

Since prebind has already been explained in detail, I want to add that
does indeed work, but if you use it on your ports it will invalidate
all of the hashes used by pkg_add  (which is most likely one of the
issues theo mentioned). With prebinding my firefox starts in 4 seconds
or so, half of what it needs without prebinding.

quoted text
> Another aspect is that Linux is much more aggressive in caching data
> from disk; if the amount of data read, the amount of work done in
> between, and the amount of RAM is such that Linux can get most data
> from its memory cache while OpenBSD has to read most of it from disk,
> Linux will be a *lot* faster. Of course, you would only see this
> effect if you started Firefox twice without doing much in between.

We're all hoping for UBC to come back in a working form, but hopefully
some are doing the actual work :)
If your box has memory to spare it will infact load firefox a lot
faster the second time, if it still has the libraries cached in memory.
A fixed size of memory is reserved for filesystem caching. What linux
does (and UBC) is remove this fixed limit and let you use all your
memory for buffer cache when it's not mapped to another application.

quoted text
> Both of those could explain why FF loads slower. If either of those is
> the big culprit, though, FF should run just as fast (slow) as it ever
> did, and since you're not likely to start it that often, I'd be
> inclined to say it isn't that big an issue.

On last thing that might add to openbsd's startup overhead is the
aggresive security stance. I don't know if library randomization has
anything to do with it, but w^x & propolice have been stated to give a
5% to 10% performance impact in certain cases. I've noticed this mostly
in applications that map & unmap a lot of memory.

I'm using openbsd on my systems, desktops & laptops included, since
release 2.7. It might not be equal to a current linux kernel
performance wise, but it's not lagging that much behind. I'll take the
cleanness, easy of use & stability any day over a 10% performance
difference. And that's not even going into the free code debate, it's
hard to get more free than openbsd.

// nick