jvh@robin.hut.fi (08/15/90)
Especially if you have 8 MB memory, I suggest that you increase the size of the disk cache in the Minix kernel (NR_BUFS in fs/const.h). I changed the size to 2048 and the speed of compilation when making a Makefile increased drastically. With a small cache most of the time in a compilation was spent in reading the compiler and the like into memory. When the cache is large enough the compilation times are comparable to a sparc or similar. On the other hand it makes it more important to say sync before halting. It probably is a good idea to increase the size of the related hash table (NR_BUF_HASH (I use 1024)). 256 (NR_BUFS) and 128 seemed reasonable with 4MBs. Some other numbers I increased without problems: - number of processes (16 -> 128) NR_PROCS in h/const.h - number of superblocks (5 -> 32) NR_SUPERS in fs/const.h It is funny how most of the numbers seem somewhat underdimensioned when there are 8 MBs of memory, 1.4GB of disk, and around 10 MIPS in a Minix system :-), as we had at one time. Johannes