Date: Sun, 12 Nov 1995 10:39:36 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: Peter Dufault <dufault@hda.com> Cc: current@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ISP state their FreeBSD concerns Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.951112103326.426B-100000@localhost> In-Reply-To: <199511121350.IAA00279@hda.com>
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On Sun, 12 Nov 1995, Peter Dufault wrote:
> >
> > 1. A concern that FreeBSD tends to "bind" for brief periods when
> > loaded...
>
> Can this is an IDE issue? I never saw anything like this until
> I configured an IDE mail server. That system pauses for seconds
> sometimes, and then continues. This is running -stable, syscons
> only (no X), no messages logged, etc. The echo stops going to
> the display, the ethernet activity is stopped, all in all it seems
> to be locked up for three or four seconds.
>
> We have three SCSI only systems and haven't ever seen this, and
> one IDE system that pauses.
On my system at home (486DX4/100, 850MB Western Digital IDE, VLB IDE
controller, 24MB RAM) the system does seem to freeze up for as much as 5
seconds when I start up a large process such as Netscape or cause one of
the existing processes to greatly expand their RAM usage (for example,
looking through the 1000 messages that sometimes accumulate in my INBOX
using pine, or loading a large number of pictures into XV). I think it's
a problem with the VM code swapping pages to disk, and the IDE driver using
up a large percentage of CPU doing PIO transfers instead of DMA transfers
that an EIDE driver (such as the one in Linux?) would be able to do.
I know, I know, IDE sucks, but a large number of users (and hopefully, a
very SMALL number of ISP's use it) and so any improvement to the IDE
driver to add EIDE support, especially DMA transfers, would speed things
up nicely. I know someone was working on this, has it made its way into
-current yet?
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Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com
Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL
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