Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 09:26:31 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: "Daniel R. Brownstone" <drbrowns@ls.wustl.edu> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Optimizing FreeBSD Message-ID: <19980327092631.07893@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980326132330.18811E-100000@ls.wustl.edu>; from Daniel R. Brownstone on Thu, Mar 26, 1998 at 01:26:52PM -0600 References: <19980326145956.12247@freebie.lemis.com> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980326132330.18811E-100000@ls.wustl.edu>
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On Thu, 26 March 1998 at 13:26:52 -0600, Daniel R. Brownstone wrote: > On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Greg Lehey wrote: > >> 1. You mention a disk light being on. This could be a clue, but I've >> noticed that happening a number of times when disk access wasn't >> the problem, so we should defer that until we have to look at it. > > Ok. Deferred. > > >> 2. You have a 100 BaseT network. What kind of board? Could be that >> there are problems with the driver. Could be that they're coupled >> with problems with the net (bad cable, for example). > > I'm going to guess that it's a 3Com, because that's what's in all of our > other PCs, but I will have to get a definitive answer on it and let you > know. I will also replace the cable just in case. 3Coms usually don't cause problems. It's important to know the right one, though. >> 3. You say the system slows down over a period of time. Is this the >> case from the console as well? Maybe you can recognize some kind >> of unusual circumstance, like excessive retransmits or such. I >> can't tell you where to look here, just how to go about looking >> for it. > > Yes, it is as slow at the console as it is over the network. I'im not > sure how to look for excessive retransmits, or the like. It's beyond my > experience, but I'd be delighted to try, if you could tell me how. If you don't know how to do this, this is probably not the way to go. >> 4. You should consider building a debug kernel with the kernel >> debugger. You can strip the kernel before booting, but you need >> the debug version (about 10 MB) for dump analysis. Take a look at >> the online handbook for more details. That way we at least have >> an idea of what has gone wrong. > > How long (projected) before 2.2.6 is stable enough to upgrade to? 2.2.6-RELEASE was released about 2 days ago. It's available now from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org, and will be available on CD-ROM in a couple of weeks. > Is this something I should do straight away, or just wait till we're > going to go to 2.2.6 and include the debugging in the new kernel I > build then? That depends on how urgent you find the problem. There's nothing that suggests to me that the problem will be gone in 2.2.6. At a guess, I'd say that it's caused by something outside the kernel, though of course the kernel is letting the problem exist. One question I forgot to ask you is: what programs are you running? Greg To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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