The P90 creeks along running the modern kernel. mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening.
In this whole exercise I've learned something valuable:
This is all very reasonable.
If someone told me they'd spend an immense effort to speed something up by 0.15 seconds I would think them extremely foolish. That 0.15 seconds translates to 60 seconds on the P90.
My AMD has literally 1,000 times more memory than the P90.
If someone said they spent some enormous effort and took the memory footprint of something from 40MB down to 28MB I'd think they're just doing a hobby but of course on the P90 that's 10% of the memory available.
As machines have progressed, the great wins of the past have become nearly unmeasurable noise.
The OpenSSH server, for example, a fairly competently written piece of software, takes about 8 seconds to serve me a password prompt.
People aren't being foolish or irresponsible or naive in not caring about these things, they're being sensible. Running a Pentium 90 with modern software --- that's the actual unreasonable hobby here.
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Here's me doing a
* side-by-side gcc compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUk9f7Nv2dM
* trying to play a video I had transcoded to 160x120 in a futile attempt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMTz5PNpkcw (original video I'm attempting to play is here: https://shop.cpurecords.net/track/sheffield-bleep)
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Edit: I'll give y'all access.
* telnet bootstra386.com:1994
* ssh bootstra386.com:1995
* user/pass: hn/hn
cat /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo if you want to gawk. I've put some nice things in /usr/pkg/bin. Try not to wreck it.