Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2000 10:53:24 -0800 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: R Joseph Wright <rjoseph@nwlink.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: some performance issues Message-ID: <386F9EA4.66B1B919@3-cities.com> References: <386C023E.680FC31@inna.net> <386C0676.F39EC477@3-cities.com> <386C2354.ABD1ED54@nwlink.com> <386C3173.1D695393@3-cities.com> <386C543D.6E59C9DF@nwlink.com> <19991231104441.C2609@emu.sourcee.com> <386CE8AB.29A140B5@nwlink.com> <386CF9DC.B71A9887@3-cities.com> <386D3D3C.C92D02A3@nwlink.com> <386D5C88.B8257D45@3-cities.com> <386D8ABD.C2894A91@nwlink.com> <386D9271.C3B7DD95@3-cities.com> <386F2582.E5910672@nwlink.com>
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R Joseph Wright wrote: > > Kent Stewart wrote: > > > > R Joseph Wright wrote: > > > > > > > > I recompiled my kernel and changed the flags from 0x80ff80ff to > > > > > 0xa0ffa0ff. What is a good program to use to see if I can really tell a > > > > > difference? I tried out some of my bigger programs like star office and > > > > > gimp. Star Office still took a little while to load, gimp seemed to fly > > > > > (when it wasn't crashing). > > > > > > > > I use "iozone -s 160m" because I have 128MB of memory. The size of the > > > > file needs to be larger than memory so you aren't benchmarking the > > > > cache. You can find it in the packages/benchmark area of the CDROM. > > > > > > > > Kent > > > > > > Kent, I tried that, only for me it worked doing "iozone 160". Here is > > > my results: > > > > > > 11483869 bytes/second for reading > > > 15155142 bytes/second for writing > > > > > > Is that really slow? It's nowhere near 33MB/second. I have a Maxtor > > > 7000rpm with UDMA66 capabilities, although I'll have to wait for -STABLE > > > to support that, and a new motherboard as well. I may recompile with > > > the old flags just to see the difference. > > > > > > > What you will see with the old flags is probably 6-7MB/s. Remember > > that UDMA66 is the rate that the buffer transfers data. The continuous > > rate off of the HD is MUCH less :). I think the lvd IBM Scsi's are > > rated at 20.2MB/s continuous and not the 80MB/s of the interface. > > > > Kent > > I didn't have to rebuild with the old flags, I just rebooted the old > one. The results were noticeably lower: You can set the flags by doing a boot -c. That leaves the kernel in a permanent configuration and you can play with other features. > > 8918121 bytes/second read > 10599623 bytes/second write > > I looked back in the book and saw another option, 0x1000 for LBA > addressing. So, I recompiled with flags 0xb0ffb0ff. Here are the > results for that: > > 11652108 bytes/second read > 15219586 bytes/second write > > Slightly higher than with 0xa0ffa0ff. I'm getting the hang of this. I think you have the rates reversed. It has been my experience that the read is always faster than the write. If you had set the LBA and the drive wasn't using LBA, you suddenly wouldn't be able to access your system. You have to be carefull what you specify :). I don't believe that rawio means anything. I think it is sort of like a race car setup for time trials. They would be dangerous when you run them at full speed and a full tank of fuel. You use HD I/O through the cache and a benchmark that uses cache is more representative of what your programs are going to see. You need to be able to do both styles of testing because each has its place. The ports have a newer version of iozone. It is up to version 3.9. With it you have to specify the size as the -s option. I have a couple of drives that are very fast sequentially but in the random section of iozone they fall way down. I had two space heater scsi drives. They were an old Fujitsu and a Maxtor PO12s and were 5.25" full heights. They specified the amount of air flow needed to maintain the warranty. They lost a cooling fan where I used to work and the heat turned spots of a Fujitsu case blue as the drive cooked. The Maxtor was much faster on sequential I/O but the Fujitsu was much faster on random I/O. Working on a server, the Fujitsu would have been more effective. It remained the fastest on random until I replaced the Maxtor with a 4.1GB Seagate Barracudda. It was faster in all categories than the Maxtor and and the Fujitsu. The IDE drives in that timeframe were running around 2MB/s and the only way I knew I was using a shared drive was when programs loaded much faster. The access over the 100Mbs network was faster from the Baracudda than it was from the local drive. > > > > > Happy New Year (why am I sitting at this computer 8-) )! > > > > Well, if it makes you feel better, there are two of us doing the same > > thing. I hit my first 2000 problem. I wanted to do an update from > > today's Stock Market with Quicken 99 and I suddenly had 3 accounts > > that were each worth $10-40M US. Something overflowed. The smallest > > account was the one that jumped to $40M. The system was quickly > > restored from the last backup and now I'm installing Quicken 2000. > > People believe stuff like this. All I could do was chuckle. It is also > > the first time I ran Quicken since I upgraded to Windows 2000 gold. > > I just had my first y2k problem too. After eating too much celebratory > ben&jerry's ice cream last night, I proceeded to delete the contents of > my /usr/bin directory. I tried a number of things like just going in to > /usr/src/usr.bin and doing 'make'. I didn't have 'make' anymore. > Luckily, I had an unused partition on my hard drive. I decided to > install a 4.0 snapshot from a cdrom onto it. From there, I mounted my > -STABLE /usr and copied the contents from the 4.0 /usr/bin into the > -STABLE. Then I rebooted the -STABLE, and tried to remake the /usr/bin > directory again using the -STABLE sources. I got an error message that > said something like "This isn't NetBSD. You lose!" I thought that was > cruel. Think of it as shock therapy. You were trying something that was really a bad idea and they wanted to wake you up :). > > So I cvsup'ed the latest -STABLE sources again and did make world, just > to make sure everything was just right. Now it's working beautifully. > I knew I could fix it without reinstalling! I tried -current, which is the 4.0 stuff for awhile. I needed more time to make it work and wanted to use the system and not play with the OS. I'm retired and could play with current on a different machine. I have one that I could convert from Windows 2000 to FreeBSD. I was using it during the beta testing because it was just above their suggest minimum. That means it isn't really fast enough to take advantage of NT but would run FreeBSD just fine. It has 6 years of TurboTax runs on it and I just have to move them to a different system. I can't eat ice cream any more because of the sugar. The 4.0 /bin wouldn't work because there are probably many changes to /etc and other directories. The system is spread out and they all have to be at the same level. I re-did the Quicken download around 10-11 am on Saturday and everything was back to normal. I think what happened was that they shut the databases down for the year end but didn't turnoff the download stuff and it returned strange or all 1's when I did my nightly update. This translated into a really hokey price for the stocks. Instead of a stock being worth $10 it was suddenly $10000 or something equally large. > > > > > I did watch some of the stuff in Times Square in NY. In Washington > > State, they cancelled a cellebration around the Space Needle because > > they caught terrorist's coming in to WA from Canada. That part is > > enough to keep you home on the computer :). > > > > Kent > > I actually live in downtown Seattle and had a beautiful view of the > fireworks at the Space Needle from my roof. I guess they only cancelled > allowing people in to Seattle Center to get a real close-up view. The > most amazing thing though, was the sound of people cheering from all > directions and cars honking for many minutes nonstop. That was pretty > darn cool. I watched it on TV. The fireworks at various levels on the Space Needle were cool. They were also lighting fireworks locally. Someone always has some firecrackers and the loud noises had all of the local birds in an up roar. We have 1000's of Canadian Geese feeding locally until it gets cold and they move further south. Some stay around until it starts to freeze the Columbia river over or we have a lot of snow on the ground. This doesn't happen very often and so we have these large birds around all winter. Because of the birds, there are some areas you wouldn't want to walk around wearing really nice shoes :). Kent -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html FreeBSD News http://daily.daemonnews.org/ SETI(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @ HOME http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ Hunting Archibald Stewart, b 1802 in Ballymena, Antrim Co., NIR http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/genealogy/archibald_stewart.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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