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Date:      Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:45:05 +0300
From:      Alexey Popov <lol@chistydom.ru>
To:        Tom Evans <tevans.uk@googlemail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: 2 x quad-core system is slower that 2 x dual core on FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <47431D21.4050804@chistydom.ru>
In-Reply-To: <1195577222.82763.20.camel@localhost>
References:  <4741905E.8050300@chistydom.ru>	<fhs3s5$knj$1@ger.gmane.org>	 <47419AB3.5030008@chistydom.ru>	<fhs7db$2es$1@ger.gmane.org>	 <4741B3DE.2000009@chistydom.ru> <fhsl0v$n85$1@ger.gmane.org>	 <47430AE8.7050408@chistydom.ru> <1195577222.82763.20.camel@localhost>

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Hi.

Tom Evans wrote:
>> After that I rebuilt with SMP GENERIC kernel and put on that server 2 
>> times more requests that UP could handle. For the first time it worked 
>> good. Then I increased load to 2.5 times more than UP. Immediately 
>> Apache child count increased to MaxClients (24), most of them in RUN 
>> state, and %sys became greater than %user (see attach). I think after 
>> some threshold of load FreeBSD is paying more CPU time to the management 
>> of running processes than to run them.
> MaxClients of 24 seems very low for a 8 cpu box, running prefork MPM. On
> our quad CPU boxes, running custom apache modules, we use 
>   MaxClients 70
>   MinSpareServers 5
>   MaxSpareServers 15
>   StartServers 20
> Perhaps you are seeing high system load because the system is having to
> maintain a lot of queued connections. Certainly, our load remains
> in-between comfortable margins, except when heavily stressed.
I believe 8-core FreeBSD server is able to maintain 1024 waiting TCP 
connections without measurable CPU load.

As of this problem: increasing MaxClients leads to growing %sys part of 
CPU load. Generally large MaxClients value is useful when most Apache 
children are waiting for I/O or something else but CPU.

With best regards,
Alexey Popov



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