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Date:      Fri, 10 Jun 2016 08:38:36 -0700
From:      Tim Kientzle <tim@kientzle.com>
To:        Gergely Imreh <imrehg@gmail.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD ARM <freebsd-arm@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: RPi2 i/o blocking and SD card performance
Message-ID:  <3AA7AD8C-E6E9-4E8E-96D2-5A712EBD8D52@kientzle.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJ3iQcoc5nVSFz3JKMG_Y9Q9k4PFizmp2rf3vfA7nv=u_12nBQ@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CAJ3iQcoc5nVSFz3JKMG_Y9Q9k4PFizmp2rf3vfA7nv=u_12nBQ@mail.gmail.com>

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> On Jun 9, 2016, at 2:37 AM, Gergely Imreh <imrehg@gmail.com> wrote:
>=20
> Hi,
>=20
> I've been testing FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT on a RaspberryPi2. I'm =
relatively
> new to FreeBSD, and wondering if there's any advice for improving the
> performance a bit.
>=20
> First, it looks like there's a lot of i/o blocking behaviour going on. =
For
> example running MediaWiki on the board, if I compile any ports, the =
site
> itself is pretty much unusable (the PHP scripts time out even with =
180s
> timeouts). The strangest thing is that the CPU usage is not at 100% =
all the
> way, can be that all 4 cores are ~99% idle, and still everything goes =
very
> slow. Once the ports compilation or any other i/o-related task is =
finished,
> it's snappy again.
>=20
> Any idea why it could be to have such big latency/lag even though the =
CPU
> is idle? Is there anything I could test?

Watch vmstat output for a while during these periods.  In the past, =
I=E2=80=99ve
noticed the CPU alternating between being completely busy and completely
idle.  When I last asked about this, I recall someone pointing to the =
disk buffer
management as the culprit =E2=80=94 apparently, with slow devices such =
as SD cards
it tends to accumulate pending writes, then everything blocks while the =
disk
cache drains.

But I may have misunderstood...

Tim





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