From owner-freebsd-current Tue Nov 28 23: 6:26 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from newsmangler.inet.tele.dk (nntp118.netscum.dk [193.162.153.118]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EFAF337B402 for ; Tue, 28 Nov 2000 23:06:21 -0800 (PST) Received: (from news@localhost) by newsmangler.inet.tele.dk (8.11.1/8.11.1) id eAT76E516121; Wed, 29 Nov 2000 08:06:14 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from news) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 08:06:14 +0100 (CET) Message-Id: <200011290706.eAT76E516121@newsmangler.inet.tele.dk> From: News User Reply-To: freebsd-user@netscum.dk To: current@freebsd.org Cc: usenet@tdk.net Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Here's a report, that you may ignore if needed... I'm building news machines with two partitions for OSen, to allow me to boot into my choice, where my choice has been FreeBSD-STABLE or FreeBSD-CURRENT to see how the two compare, and if there are any significant improvements in -CURRENT. I know, ``don't do that'' but hey... Anyway, using the performance with -STABLE as a reference on this system with currently a single CPU, I built a freshly cvsup'ed -CURRENT just under 24 hours ago and then ran it in production for about ten hours before reverting back to -STABLE. First of all, after building a custom kernel and mounting several disks with softupdates, I then gave a command to cp -pR /news/dir to /news/FreeBSD-STABLE-dir , where the /news disk is mounted with both softupdates and noatime. Quickly I got a panic: ffs_valloc: dup alloc and everything froze solid. I didn't attempt to repeat this to see if it is repeatable. I disabled the softupdates, remounted the disk (just noatime) and again gave the cp -pR command, which succeesed. In fact, for the next ten hours, I attempted to pump a full newsfeed through this machine with no problems and stable operation. A few other drives are mounted with both noatime and softupdates, but without the file creation activity one gets with the command I gave. Also, I was sort of running low on inodes, although I never actually ran out, if that would make any difference. Now, as far as performance goes, after running for ten hours and getting a feel for how well it was doing, I rebooted back into -STABLE and restarted things. However, I see a huge performance increase with -STABLE compared to -CURRENT. That is, I'm able to take in many more times the number of articles with -STABLE than the machine running -CURRENT could handle. Like by a factor of ten. Basically, apart from the current/stable switch, the machine is identical in both OSen, and there shoulr be no difference in the news software proper. The kernel configs should be comparable too. Yeah, I know, -current is in a state of transition, but I didn't expect its performance to be quite *this* bad... These are just some observations, in the hope they might be useful. thanks, barry bouwsma, putting hardware to waste since 1997 (use reply-to header if this message is worthy of comment best kept off the list) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message