Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 22:47:44 -0700 From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Speed deamons: How to build a build box? Message-ID: <199704190547.WAA17328@MindBender.serv.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 18 Apr 97 13:16:41 -0600. <E0wIJ9F-0005Yv-00@rover.village.org>
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> I have a PPro 180 machine that is currently building world in about
>5 hours +-. This time is from a "clean" state, not from a previously
>built state. I've been told that it maybe possible to do this in 1:21.
Unless there is something really huge in your source tree that isn't
in mine, yours is taking waaay too long.
> How do I morph the machine I have into a faster build box?
>I have 64M memory, a SuperMicro 6SNS motherboard, 60ns memory, and one
>SCSI disk (a Quantum Fireball 10.5ms 4500). A second disk (a jaz drive,
>12ms 5400) didn't seem to make the build faster or slower. The MB has
>built in SCSI "2940UW". The fireball is the "ultra" version only.
If I remember right, there were some of these that were actually much
less capable than their stand-alone counterparts (only allowed three
outstanding transactions, or something like that). Wonder if you got
one of those.
>As I see it, I have the following avenues to make it faster:
> 1) Buy more memory
You have more than enough already.
> 2) Buy 50ns memory (the board can cope)
That shouldn't matter much.
> 3) Buy a faster disk, ultrawide scsi 7200 or faster disk.
This could help. But you'd be better off buying more smaller disks
(4500-5400 rpm, not wide) and striping them. Do some people not
listen? (See Joe Greco's millions of posts on this.)
> 4) Overclock the 180 to 200 or 233 (I have a good heat sink and fan)
Somebody wasn't paying attention when I said don't buy a multiple of
30. Sigh. A 166 would most likely have run faster.
On the upside, you can probably overclock that chip to 200MHz. That
will make a significant difference (though not more than 10%).
> 5) Get a second scsi bus
Couldn't hurt.
> 6) ccd?
Get the religion, brother!
>Can those that have tweaked for this sort of thing help me out here? I'm
>running -current as of April 17 (ctm cvs-cur 3222).
>Also, what is the 1:21 number really?
I'm at least one of the people who claimed a 1:21 time. Here's what I
did...
It was on NetBSD just before 1.2 was released -- not FreeBSD. There
shouldn't be a significant difference, though.
I did it on a 200MHz Pentium Pro, running in an Asus P6NP5 (Natoma/440FX)
motherboard. Using 64MB of 60ns EDO SIMMs.
I was running an Adaptec 2940UW (the real card, not a built-in chip),
with tagged-command-queuing turned on in the kernel. All my binaries
and sources were on one Seagate 2GB Barracuda -- very fast, and the
object tree was writing to a mostly empty old Seagate 1GB 31200N --
not super fast (both drives were borrowed). My filesystems were async
mounted.
All my binaries, including the kernel, had been built previously with
these flags (under gcc 2.7.2): -O6 -m486 -pipe -fno-strength-reduce.
I also did the test build with the same flags. The object directory
was totally empty at the beginning of the build. I let the build do
all the standard parts (build standard, profiled, and shared
libraries, format man pages, etc.), including make install.
The build output was directed to a text file, and I checked the text
file after the build to verify that there were no failures during the
build which might have affected the time (and there were none). I was
not running X, but was running only a text console during the build.
I can't think of anything else relevant...
Although I was running on borrowed, non-striped drives during these
tests, my "production" system that I use for day-to-day work is ccd
striped over four SCSI drives. FWIW...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
--< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >--
NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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