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Date:      Fri, 30 Aug 2002 11:51:27 -0500
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To:        Marc Schneiders <marc@schneiders.org>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Why is this box so slow?
Message-ID:  <20020830165127.GA54808@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <20020830144957.C27785-100000@voo.doo.net>
References:  <20020830144957.C27785-100000@voo.doo.net>

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In the last episode (Aug 30), Marc Schneiders said:
> I am running FreeBSD 4 stable on a Pentium II 300 with sufficient
> RAM, I think. Nevertheless certain things are very, very slow. A
> buildworld takes days. Also opening a large (18 MB file) with vi
> doesn't work out for ages. (I am now waiting 5 minutes and still
> nothing to edit...)

What does top and "vmstat 1" say while you're running vi?  Try trussing
the binary also, and see what kinds of syscalls it's making.
 
> Another thing that is very slow is fsck after the machine crashed.
> Hours. Harddisks are reported to run as UDMA-33. So?

Fsck speed is mainly limited by the number of used inodes on the
filesystem.  I've got an 18gb filesystem with 1 million used inodes
that takes 20 minutes to check, and a bunch of 180gb volumes that take
30 seconds each.

Hours seems like way too long, although from the sizes of the disks in
your dmesg, you probably have 10-100x the inodes you really need.  The
default for my 18gb disk was 8 million inodes, so your 38gb drive
probably has 16m.  And my disk only has 1 million used even though I
have a 7gig squid cache, full ports CVS, and full -current CVS trees on
that filesystem :)

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com

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