The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

… and the cops go wizzing by …

The last time I saw this many cops was a few years ago when the bank our company was above was being robbed.* This time however, about two dozen cop cars (at least, maybe more) just flew by our office, sirens blaring and turned right at the corner into one of the many commercial parks in this section of Boca Raton, Florida. I figure we'll hear about it on the news later tonight, tomorrow at the latest.

* It was a Friday afternoon in '98 or '99 when the building we were in was surrouded by Boca's Finest. Shortly afterwards, the SWAT team showed up, and took positions around the building. A police officer managed to make it up the back stairs to our office and told us to keep the door locked. After a few tense hours the suspect was arrested—it turned out he was an escaped mental patient.

Waiting … waiting … waiting.

Compiling on the Cobalt RaQ2 isn't fast. It's actually rather sluggish when you come right down to it. Now whether that is a function of the MIPS chip, a slow bus speed, or a slow IDE drive, I can't say, although I suspect it may be a slow bus speed (the MIPS based SGI system I used at FAU, while only 33 MHz, was fast—the only things faster were the newer MIPS based SGIs).

Time it took to compile various packages on a 250MHz MIPS based Cobalt RaQ2
Package Real time User time System time
MySQL 4.1.11 312m, 31.074s 288m, 52.820s  20m, 32.900s
Bind 9.3.1 51m,  0.245s 47m,  2.640s  3m, 20.260s
Apache 2.0.54 84m, 26.658s 66m,  6.710s 16m, 45.680s
PHP 4.3.11 56m, 17.193s 45m, 44.070s  9m, 52.470s

These were just the packages I kept the compile times for—the rest (like OpenSSL or NTP were just as slow to compile.

I wonder though … if there is a way to tune the IDE drivers to get some better throughput …

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