ImageMagick / NetPBM performance

[David Fokkema <dfokkema@ileos.nl>]

Hi group,

I recently installed debian on an NSLU2 and I'm encountering the
following problem. ImageMagick (and NetPBM) are extremely slow when
resizing photo's. Of course, I know I can't expect to much of it, but on
my desktop (Intel Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz) convert finishes in about 0.696 s
of user time whereas on my NSLU2 (ARM 266 Mhz) it uses 23.57 s of user
time. That is to be expected, of course. Oh, I forgot, it also uses
8m29.430 s of system time. Adding up to a real time of 9m! Why is that?
How can I figure out what's going on? It's not swapping or something
like that, although convert uses up half my memory (only 32Mb). NetPBM
uses up far less memory, finishes a bit sooner but also spends 92% of
the time in kernel mode (sys). Any help debugging this would be very
much appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

David