From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 11 11:16: 2 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from feldspato.ist.utl.pt (feldspato.ist.utl.pt [193.136.143.16]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F04F514C49 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 11:15:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wlan@feldspato.ist.utl.pt) Received: from localhost (wlan@localhost) by feldspato.ist.utl.pt (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id TAA05120; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 19:14:38 +0100 Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 19:14:38 +0100 (WEST) From: "TFC WLAN 97/98 - IST - ext.2269 (8418269)" To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: pagaime@rccn.net Subject: Slow FreeBSD 3.2 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello all We have a Dell 4300 with 2 9GB SCSI disks, 512MB and a Pentium II 450 MHz CPU. But, when ever 'top' reports a process in 'newbuf', 'getblk' or 'biowr', the system becomes very slow, sometimes for a few seconds. We can't even do a 'ls' properly... Unfortunately the system ends up on that state whenever 'pine' or 'popper' runs on a large mailbox. Of course we can't convince people to use 'maildir'. Since the machine is almost idle - CPU and memory - why does this happen ? Is it a driver/disk problem ? What do those states reported by top ('newbuf', 'getblk', 'biowr') mean ? Is there some kernel optimization we can do ? Kernel upgrade ? Thanks, Joao To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message