general question re: performance

[Glenn Becker]

All -

One of the reasons I jumped into trying a kernel configuration/compile is 
that I have been noticing performance issues with STABLE.

(if you are reading and want to skip the following explanatory verbiage 
the questions are: how do I profile applications to figure out where the 
performance bottleneck is? and can these be addressed by compiling a 
custom kernel?)

=>explanatory verbiage

I'm running 6.2 on an old but not ancient Dell laptop, PIII 1000MHz, which 
now has seven operating systems on it. I have noticed recently that the 
graphics-heavy planetarium program Stellarium -- which runs great on my 
Debian GNU/Linux system -- barely creaks along on FreeBSD and is basically 
unusable.

This is NOT FreeBSD bashing ... it's more that I feel as though 1) 
something may have changed since I last used the system much and/or 2) I 
am doing something stupid. I am actually accustomed to FreeBSD being 
lighter and faster than the Linuxes, so it especially surprised me.

In my quest to get my ports up to speed I have noticed some gugundous 
compilation times, too ... when I had FreeBSD running on a certifiably 
ancient Pentium laptop I got used to letting make buildworld run 
overnight ... but at the moment I am looking at the make of gfortran some 
hours after I kicked it off.

So ... I would like to know how to profile applications (like Stellarium) 
to see where the bottlenecks are and then know more about how to fix them. 
Is it generally accepted that a custom kernel with all the fat trimmed 
will help?

Thanks in advance,

Glenn

+-----------------------------------------------------+
Glenn Becker - burningc at sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
+-----------------------------------------------------+