Waiting … waiting … waiting.

Compiling on the Cobalt RaQ2 isn't fast. It's actually rather sluggish when you come right down to it. Now whether that is a function of the MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages) chip, a slow bus speed, or a slow IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) drive, I can't say, although I suspect it may be a slow bus speed (the MIPS based SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.) [1] system I used at FAU (Florida Atlantic University) [2], while only 33 MHz (MegaHertz), was fast—the only things faster were the newer MIPS based SGIs).

Table: Time it took to compile various packages on a 250MHz MIPS based Cobalt RaQ2
Package	Real time	User time	System time
------------------------------
MySQL 4.1.11	312m, 31.074s	288m, 52.820s	 20m, 32.900s
Bind 9.3.1	51m,  0.245s	47m,  2.640s	 3m, 20.260s
Apache 2.0.54	84m, 26.658s	66m,  6.710s	16m, 45.680s
PHP 4.3.11	56m, 17.193s	45m, 44.070s	 9m, 52.470s

These were just the packages I kept the compile times for—the rest (like OpenSSL [3] or NTP (Network Time Protocol) [4] were just as slow to compile.

I wonder though … if there is a way to tune the IDE drivers to get some better throughput …

[1] http://www.sgi.com/

[2] http://www.fau.edu/

[3] http://www.openssl.org/

[4] http://www.ntp.org/

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