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Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 05:43:41 +1000
From: Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy@optushome.com.au>
To: Ewan Todd <ewan@mathcode.net>
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cc: freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Performance issue
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On Mon, 2005-May-09 11:00:18 -0400, Ewan Todd wrote:
>I have what I think is a serious performance issue with fbsd 5.3
>release.  I've read about threading issues, and it seems to me that
>that is what I'm looking at, but I'm not confident enough to rule out
>that it might be a hardware issue, a kernel configuration issue, or
>something to do with the python port.

There does appear to be a problem in FreeBSD.  Python is built with
threading enabled by default, the threading libraries play with the
signal mask and there have been extensive changes there.  My
suggestions on things you could check are:
1) Rebuild python with threading disabled (add '-DWITHOUT_THREADS' to the
   'make' command line and see if that makes any difference
2) Re-write the sample program in a non-threaded language - eg C or perl
   and see if the high system time goes away.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a solution at present.

-- 
Peter Jeremy