From owner-freebsd-stable Fri Apr 20 6:35:11 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from ns5.pacific.net.au (ns5.pacific.net.au [203.143.252.30]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3AF5937B422 for ; Fri, 20 Apr 2001 06:35:08 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mckay@thehub.com.au) Received: from dungeon.home (ppp227.dyn248.pacific.net.au [203.143.248.227]) by ns5.pacific.net.au (8.9.0/8.9.1) with ESMTP id XAA12694; Fri, 20 Apr 2001 23:35:04 +1000 (EST) Received: from dungeon.home (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by dungeon.home (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f3KDZuV26406; Fri, 20 Apr 2001 23:35:58 +1000 (EST) (envelope-from mckay) Message-Id: <200104201335.f3KDZuV26406@dungeon.home> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Cc: mckay@thehub.com.au Subject: The metronome Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 23:35:55 +1000 From: Stephen McKay Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I've upgraded my main FreeBSD box to 4.3-RC and have found a curious result. It's not crashing, or corrupting anything, or running slow, but it *sounds* really annoying. When I use "cvs update" to refresh my -current, -stable, and ports trees, disk activity clearly pulses once every second. Previously (with 4.2-R) this was not the case (or perhaps it was very faintly underneath the other disk activity). I'm finding this "pulsing" quite irritating, and am willing to sacrifice a lot of disk speed to be rid of it. Which sysctl options, if any, can I use to prevent synchronised once per second pulses of disk activity? Possibly useful hardware hints: K6-2/300, MVP3 chipset, 96MB ram, ncr875 scsi, multiple IBM UW disks (one has the CVSROOT and another the checked out source trees). I update the source trees one at a time. Stephen. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message