Date: Wed, 15 Feb 1995 14:48:13 +0000 From: Ed Hudson <elh@p5.spnet.com> To: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: 950210-SNAP, VM Free Message-ID: <199502151448.OAA17257@p5.spnet.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 15 Feb 1995 11:38:39 GMT." <199502151138.LAA00446@p5.spnet.com>
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howdy. let me restate the problem... i'm experiencing a significant loss in performance under 950210-SNAP as a function of integrated system activity. it looks somewhat like a memory problem, but could be a problem with the file system (buffer cache?). after the system has been up a while, and done a bunch of work, and is then quiescent, the disk chatters a lot, lot more for all operations than when it reboots. i think that the csh time command's 'io' field correlates with both the sound that the disks make, and the loss of performance. (with loss in performance is measured as wall clock time) other than the number of io transactions reported by csh, and the loss in performance, the only macroscopic parameters that i can glean from the system show a huge drop in free memory. a freshly booted system: time /bin/ls -LFC : 0.0u 0.0s 0:00.06 66.6% 231+399k 0+0io 0pf+0w medium make : 112.8u 24.3s 2:45.41 82.9% 869+1047k 336+1564io 8pf+0w after a big compile: time /bin/ls -LFC : 0.0u 0.0s 0:00.57 14.0% 205+352k 24+0io 0pf+0w medium make : 113.0u 25.9s 4:07.75 56.0% 862+1040k 5571+1564io 14pf+0w (the '/bin/ls time is actually the second (or third, etc) one, - the very first always takes a long time). please note the huge increase in the 'io' parameters, as well as the increase in wall clock time for both operations between the freshly booted system and the system after an hour's work. on an 'old' system, even if i kill -15 the x-server, so that i log out all of the way and xdm starts a new x server, i still experience the problem after i log back in.. is this a memory problem? i don't know. but a system that's been up for a while, and done a bunch of work, makes an awful lot more disk transactions than one that's very recently booted. people tell me that the numbers reported by top (below) are insufficient for understanding the memory stats. what top thinks fresh : Memory: 14M Act 1520K Inact 2860K Wired 13M Free what top thinks old : Memory: 15M Act 1192K Inact 3220K Wired 3812K Free 3% Swap i've sup'ped, and i'm recompiling now, so i hope to understand if i have this problem with -current thanks for reading. -elh
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