From owner-freebsd-isp Sun Nov 12 10:37:52 1995 Return-Path: owner-isp Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id KAA18502 for isp-outgoing; Sun, 12 Nov 1995 10:37:52 -0800 Received: from localhost.lightside.com (user47.lightside.com [198.81.209.47]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA18484 ; Sun, 12 Nov 1995 10:37:44 -0800 Received: (from jehamby@localhost) by localhost.lightside.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) id KAA00453; Sun, 12 Nov 1995 10:39:36 -0800 Date: Sun, 12 Nov 1995 10:39:36 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby X-Sender: jehamby@localhost To: Peter Dufault cc: current@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ISP state their FreeBSD concerns In-Reply-To: <199511121350.IAA00279@hda.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk 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? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL ------------------------------------------------------------------------------