Not really a fully laptop type question but maybe related I guess.

4.3-STABLE on a Toshiba 4005 (Pentium II 233mhz)

Let me preface these remarks with a comment to set the tone. This is not an attempt at starting a religous war a la linux vs FreeBSD.

I suspect what I see is the result of poor or misguided configs on my part but have no clue what things to look at.

I only run FreeBSD on my laptop, and lately only use it occasionally. So I'm much more accustomed to Linux or Solaris machines that I run much more frequently. The linux machine really gets the vast bulk of use. It is a celeron 400mhz so that may be part of what I'm seeing here. But I think I've noticed this to be generally true over several version changes beginning around 3.4.

The FreeBSD OS seems to be markedly slower at some kinds of fs activity. Inparticular, deleting directories seems to be incredibly and unreasonably slow.

A few examples here may be in order. This is a directory full of mail messages. One message to a file. du -sh dir_test 3.3M dir_test

time rm -rf dir_test real 0m26.192s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.201s

Almost half a minute... isn't that a little ridiculous?

The same chore on the linux (400mhz)

$ time rm -rf dir_test

real 0m0.048s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.040s

I understand the FreeBSD fs is said to be more robust and secure. But I wonder if what I see is even normal. It seems just too grindingly slow. Deleting a 2-300MB directory is a major time sinkhole.

Look at this.

A directory full of directories full of mail messages, some 94MB takes what is really an obscenely long time to remove.

du -sh mail_test 94M mail_test

time rm -rf mail_test real 8m52.891s user 0m0.199s sys 0m3.950s

Almost nine minutes... Can that even be right.

Trying it again:

a little better but still awfully slow:

rm -rf mail_test real 7m13.484s user 0m0.117s sys 0m3.080s

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