From owner-freebsd-performance@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Aug 7 09:40:16 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B693610656D2 for ; Fri, 7 Aug 2009 09:40:16 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from grarpamp@gmail.com) Received: from mail-ew0-f206.google.com (mail-ew0-f206.google.com [209.85.219.206]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 246CD8FC1E for ; Fri, 7 Aug 2009 09:40:15 +0000 (UTC) Received: by ewy2 with SMTP id 2so1449824ewy.43 for ; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 02:40:15 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:mime-version:received:date:message-id:subject :from:to:content-type:content-transfer-encoding; bh=JQ5e9ibwZL36BdA48VN6vnEymTI28oBJFibxnW+bxmA=; b=WM7yhnF51v40J3gG14EdqnJOZGv87UnDmyKBpWVYdb09uwQomEUrxLnC/9WCjyv9h+ ntXDSN1Pp1bCgCYwwn4d4Zr7Kj57rJkEBgNjhbQyeSXPTjVXfOP8E+lCK3FBkTD7k1c2 VNXRbLhwrN++qncRr7x1snbdV21h4lcgXoFlI= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:date:message-id:subject:from:to:content-type :content-transfer-encoding; b=W1AaC4rccaKMh9BXOxnjijCGyE6os6WzZEBdkkOaQx2O/UaATENKSFiVALhRWN69jo lB2OtuMWCWbbLCxuTU36D2LXLK941ET24Q8AnNs9hzQCDOCo0FZzUEPFJuxeRrnz08Rj S8+ok1fLttjuPOKEevXfMjeI4+YcLND7xfSGg= MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.210.114.15 with SMTP id m15mr1137747ebc.0.1249636651909; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 02:17:31 -0700 (PDT) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 05:17:31 -0400 Message-ID: From: grarpamp To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailman-Approved-At: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:27:16 +0000 Subject: RELENG_7 heavy disk = system crawls X-BeenThere: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Performance/tuning List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:40:17 -0000 Hi. I'm running RELENG_7 on an older single P4. It has a lot of disk on it that does mainly sequential read/write of gigs of data. The data disks are hanging off a dumb ata133 pdc20269 card, they use geli aes 128 and zfs sha256, single spindles. Free ram, no swap, free disk, no net, etc. In short, whenever I'm doing sequential disk stuff, human interface system performance tanks, big time. Keystrokes take a second or two to appear, X11 focus raises take forever, firefox is a dog... after waiting 10min for the system to load it off disk, run it and paint it to X11, mouse movements are largely ignored unless moved very slowly. Even typing killall is painful to do :) I am very near the limit on wired mem, despite telling zfs to use only 96MiB. And sometimes X11 can't get the ram it wants and dies mid session. But neither of those should affect performance, the kernel will deal with low mem one way or another, drastically, not by bogging down [no swap enabled anyways] right? I used to do similar stuff on RELENG_4 on an old dual PII with plain UFS and I could run gigs of disk data, all the spindles, 8 of them, through sha1, all at once, and still have good interactive performance. Yet fire off one sequential read/write, perhaps piped into sha1 for more cpu load and it's game over. I can renice the user process way down into idprio with no effect. So I doubt giving rtprio to all the human processes would do anything. Is RELENG_7 or GELI+ZFS the dog here? Top of course shows GELI+ZFS eating all the cpu. Ok, fine, so how do I say, hey, I don't care about disk, it'll finish eventually, just give me my gui and keystrokes back? It just doesn't seem right that this one subsystem should be monopolizing the cpu this way? Help/cluebat? Thanks.