Comparing buildworld times on twin machines

[Charles Howse]

Hi,
I have 2 machines on my home network with (almost) identical hardware.
They both have Celeron 300, same motherboards, same BIOS, same options
set in BIOS, etc.
Same make.conf, same kernel config.  
I kill SETI at home before starting on each machine.
The only difference is that curly has 128 MB ram where larry has only
64.

They *do not*, however have identical hard drives, even though each
machine has 2 drives, with /usr/obj on the second drive of each machine.

When I buildworld, I use the following command, and write the output to
'$blog'.

[portion of script omitted, entire script is attached as update1.sh]

\time -aho $$blog make buildworld

[snip]

Larry can buildworld in 1 hr 57 mins.
It takes curly 3 hrs 16 mins, even though curly has twice the ram.

If I watch the compile, with one eye on the disk activity light, it
seems to me that the process is largely CPU intensive, therefore I would
expect that the buildworld times should be roughly equal.

1) How can I determine what might be causing curly to take so long
compared to larry?

2) Since curly runs httpd, and vsftpd, is it acceptable to run the
entire build/install process in single-user mode in order to prevent
other processes from eating CPU cycles?



Thanks,
Charles

Got a computer with idle CPU time?
Join SETI at home and help make history!
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
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