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Date:      Fri, 12 Oct 2001 14:57:17 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
To:        Jay Rossiter <jrossiter@symantec.com>
Cc:        <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Severe I/O Problems
Message-ID:  <20011012145533.C73308-100000@wonky.feral.com>
In-Reply-To: <OF771AB257.5E1F2BC6-ON88256AE3.0077DC3F@symantec.com>

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Hmm. Interesting. What's the state of the ATA write caching bit?
(sysctl hw.ata.wc)?

If it is set to 1, try setting it to 0 in /boot/loader.conf
(e.g., add

hw.ata.wc=0

)

to /boot/loader.conf

-matt


On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, Jay Rossiter wrote:

>
>      Someone on -questions recommended that I forward this over here for
> you guys to look at.  (I'm not subbed to this list)
>
> There appear to be a lot of changes that went into the filesystem and I/O
> code between 4.3 and 4.4.  A little over a week ago I upgraded my 4.3 box
> to 4.4-STABLE and immediately I started having I/O slowdown.  I do
> development and QA on a program that is very I/O bound, but the changes
> between 4.3 and 4.4 aren't small enough that I can ignore them.
>
> A few statistics:
>
> BSD, P4 1.4GHz, ATA100 drives
> - Normal test run on 4.3 was taking ~3 hours.
> - Normal test run on 4.4 is taking 15-16 hours.
>
> P3-800, ATA66 drives, SuSE Linux 7.1:
> - Normal test run takes ~4.5 hours.
>
> UltraSparc 10, Solaris 8, ATA66 drives:
> - Normal test run takes ~6 hours.
>
> As you can see, this jump was just phenomenal.
>
> I can run these tests on a custom 'ramdrive' and the test run takes 1.5
> hours on BSD.  ~4 on Solaris, ~2.5 on Linux.
>
> Even the RS/6000 I test AIX 4.3 with doesn't take this long, though I don't
> have statistics for it.
>
> It appears that the app gets stuck switching between the getblk and biowr
> states in top and ps, and very rarely does it take more than 5% of the CPU.
> On all other OS's, and even on 4.3, this app was pegging the CPU while it
> did its work.
>
> Basically.. this all comes down to "What the hell is going on here?!" and
> "Are there plans to fix it and did anyone even know there was a problem?"
>
> ---
> Jay Rossiter                             503-614-7917
> QA Engineer, Test Lead
> Symantec Corp.
>
>
>
>
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>


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