Performance of 4.x vs 5.x (Re: Lifetime of FreeBSD branches)

[Matthias Buelow]

Kris Kennaway wrote:

> One thing that probably confuses and misleads a lot of people is when
> they build world or a kernel and notice that it's taking much longer
> than it did under 4.x, so they assume this means that 5.x is slower
> than 4.x.  It doesn't.  What it means is that 5.x and 4.x have
> different C compilers, and gcc 3.x is much slower at compiling code
> than gcc 2.x.  You have to be very careful to draw conclusions based
> on subjective assessments like this.

Another thing might be that interactive response time seems to be worse.
 While I (or rather ports) unpack the firefox/thunderbird source, the
machine is pretty much bogged down (mouse cursor jumps around, audio
stutters...).  Haven't seen that on FreeBSD since the 386 days.

mkb.