Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 13:09:16 -0700 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@owt.com> To: "Charles Howse" <chowse@charter.net>, <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Comparing buildworld times on twin machines Message-ID: <200309281309.16986.kstewart@owt.com> In-Reply-To: <000001c385f7$f948a5d0$04fea8c0@moe> References: <000001c385f7$f948a5d0$04fea8c0@moe>
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On Sunday 28 September 2003 12:37 pm, Charles Howse wrote: > Hi, > I have 2 machines on my home network with (almost) identical > hardware. They both have Celeron 300, same motherboards, same BIOS, > same options set in BIOS, etc. > Same make.conf, same kernel config. > I kill SETI@home before starting on each machine. > The only difference is that curly has 128 MB ram where larry has only > 64. > > They *do not*, however have identical hard drives, even though each > machine has 2 drives, with /usr/obj on the second drive of each > machine. > > When I buildworld, I use the following command, and write the output > to '$blog'. > > [portion of script omitted, entire script is attached as update1.sh] > > \time -aho $$blog make buildworld > > [snip] > > Larry can buildworld in 1 hr 57 mins. > It takes curly 3 hrs 16 mins, even though curly has twice the ram. > > If I watch the compile, with one eye on the disk activity light, it > seems to me that the process is largely CPU intensive, therefore I > would expect that the buildworld times should be roughly equal. > > 1) How can I determine what might be causing curly to take so long > compared to larry? > > 2) Since curly runs httpd, and vsftpd, is it acceptable to run the > entire build/install process in single-user mode in order to prevent > other processes from eating CPU cycles? > > On my systems, which all run setiathome, I only see a few percent variation in buildworld time with seti running. I start setiathome with a -nice 19 so that it doesn't interfere. You might be able to see some of the processes running using top. You could always stop apache. My setup has /usr/src and /usr/obj on a 2nd and 3rd hd and I log everything to the 1st HD.. All of the HDs are on their own controller and they are ata-133's on the main system. A system with ata-66s is not 50% slower. I kind of wonder if you have cache turned on in the cpu. That much difference is pretty hard to come up with unless your 2 daemons are interfering. You might see that running top. Watch the swap to see if anything is happening. FWIW, I had one system with everything identical but the mobos and one ran 15% slower than the other. I never did figure out what was causing the difference. It is my only 400MHz machine and only use it for some special programs. Kent -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html
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