From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Mar 2 02:07:35 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0ABE916A4CE for ; Wed, 2 Mar 2005 02:07:35 +0000 (GMT) Received: from pi.codefab.com (pi.codefab.com [199.103.21.227]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BC62743D1F for ; Wed, 2 Mar 2005 02:07:34 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pi.codefab.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 359425CAF; Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:07:34 -0500 (EST) Received: from pi.codefab.com ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (pi.codefab.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 21659-04; Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:07:33 -0500 (EST) Received: from [192.168.1.3] (pool-68-161-75-250.ny325.east.verizon.net [68.161.75.250]) by pi.codefab.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 36AC45C39; Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:07:30 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <42251FB3.6090908@mac.com> Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 21:06:43 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Richard Bradley References: <200503020151.45702.rtb27@cam.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <200503020151.45702.rtb27@cam.ac.uk> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.90.0.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at codefab.com cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Updating the ports index is slow, but system load is nil X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 02:07:35 -0000 Richard Bradley wrote: [ ... ] > It doesn't have any open network connections, so I'm not waiting for a remote > machine; it doesn't have any system load so I'm not waiting for processing; > the hard disk is (largely) idle, so I'm not waiting for i/o, but I am still > waiting! > > How can I make it stop messing around and get on with it? Try "make fetchindex". Your analysis of CPU load is largely correct, but it's helpful to understand that top doesn't display reliable information for transient processes which disappear in a second. Also, your analysis of I/O loading is wrong: building the index is quite disk intensive, but it involves lots of very small transactions: take a look at "iostat 5" and notice that the MB/s is tiny, but the tps # will be significant, and quite probably so will the CPU load as measured here. -- -Chuck