two questions about the 3b1

[Lenny Tropiano]

In article <24776 at boulder.Colorado.EDU> andersom at tramp.Colorado.EDU 
(ANDERSON MARC O) writes:
|>[1] - Is it just me (or my machine) or does it take all of you 3b1'ers
|>a half an hour to compile small stuff with g++?  (gnu c++)
|>
|>It took about 30 minutes to compile a simple program like:
|>
|>main()
|>{
|>	cout << "anarchy!!!\n";
|>}
|>
|>which doesn't seem right...  (oh yeah...  with an #include <stream.h> at
|>the beginning)....
|>
|>[2] - I have a 3b1 with a 20 meg miniscribe harddrive....  I just figured
|>out how to leach my brains out with FTP, and now have about 75 blocks
|>remaining on my system....  Anyway, would it be true to say that "getting
|>a faster hard drive would increase the speed on my unix system" since most
|>of unix is hard drive access rather than processing time?  (I believe my
|>hd has about a 60 ms access time which is disgusting!!!).  
[...]

Well the problem is two fold.  So here's your two answers.  Yes, GCC and
G++ compiler is quite LARGE.  Check out that binary size ...

1039 -rwxr-xr-x   1 gnu      gnu        527024 Feb 17 12:43 gcc-cc1

That's >1/2mb executable!  gcc-ccplus (or whatever it's called) has to be
as large, if not larger.  Now, that takes a long time to be called, and
with your 20mb (~65ms seek time) hard drive that's a long time to be 
read in.

Now if my assumptions are right, the 20mb drive probably comes on your
3B1 with either 512K (eeek) or 1MB of memory.  Either way that's major
swapping ... yes, more disk writing! 

|>Supposing I get say an 80 meg hard drive with 28 ms access time (any
|>recommendations for good 80 meggers that aren't too cheap, that would
[...]
Yes, a faster drive WILL help, in fact you'll feel like you have an all new
machine after it! :-)  Another help would be memory, to cut down on the
swapping.  With my 4MB machine and 22ms seek time drive things hummm right
along.

|>work easily with the 3b1?), I still can run my 20 megger for mabey news
|>or arhives or something, correct?  How would I do this?  Would I need any of
|>those hardware upgrades that people have been talking about?  Which ones would
[...]
I'll mail you information on this...  The net has seen it many times over! :-)
For others who want it ... you can request the information on the ICUS 2nd HD
drive plans from OSU-CIS in ~/att7300/ICUS_HD2.Z or use the BITFTP server
to request it by mail...

|>andersom at tramp.Colorado.EDU

-Lenny
-- 
| Lenny Tropiano           ICUS Software Systems        lenny at icus.ICUS.COM |
| {ames,pacbell,decuac,sbcs,hombre,rayssd}!icus!lenny   attmail!icus!lenny  |
+------ ICUS Software Systems --  PO Box 1;  Islip Terrace, NY  11752 ------+