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Date:      Wed, 31 Jan 1996 10:31:56 -0800 (PST)
From:      Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>
To:        Peter Wemm <peter@jhome.DIALix.COM>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Good news -- pipe stuff
Message-ID:  <Pine.AUX.3.91.960131102030.15314A-100000@covina.lightside.com>
In-Reply-To: <peter.823081637@jhome.DIALix.COM>

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On 31 Jan 1996, Peter Wemm wrote:

> jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com (Joe Greco) writes:
> 
> >>    One interesting note, I benchmark FreeBSD vs. Linux (and used to SVR4)
> >>    regularly in order to evaluate places where performance might/should
> >>    be improved.  I am *brutal* to FreeBSD, but it is getting difficult to
> >>    find places where it can easily be improved (some of the performance
> >>    "nits" are due to differences in philosophy and not actual performance
> >>    problems.)  With the latest pipe improvements, I am running out of steam.
> >>    Indeed, my goal is to "find" performance problems.  If anyone has a "cache"
> >>    of programs to show performance bottlenecks, please email them to me.
> >>    They will be used to improve FreeBSD's performance, and if I don't
> >>    do it, DG, BDE or someone else will work on the code.
> >> 
> >>    There is another layer of improvements that I have been thinking about, but
> >>    those require more involved work, and I want to work on easier stuff right
> >>    now :-).  Brain vacation time :-).
> >> 
> >> I would suggest taking a look into uptime benchmark.  Make FreeBSD with
> >> 50-100 simultaneous users, WWW server, news server, ftp server and lots of
> >> nfs in the same machine to stay up for at least weeks in row, instead of
> >> days.  Popularity of the results is guaranteed, and that is the benchmark
> >> professionals value the most.

Another thing to look into, although I don't have a benchmark on this, but
FreeBSD has a nasty tendency to "bind" during heavy VM/disk activity.  I
don't know if this is because the IDE driver is CPU intensive, or if this
affects people (to a lesser extent) with SCSI drives.  It's just that when
the system starts paging out to disk, activity in other windows freezes up
too.  I have 24MB of RAM on my box at home, and notice this quite often, 
which is even more surprising since I don't push my system more than, say, 
running a copy of Netscape, emacs, pine, and maybe a compile. 

Speaking of VM, I set up a system with only 8MB of RAM running FreeBSD, 
and even though we made a 24MB swap partition, occasionally it fills up.  
Both boxes are running 2.1.0-RELEASE.  If it is not too difficult, I 
would be REALLY grateful if we could add functionality to add swapfiles 
and swap partitions to a running system.  Even better would be the 
ability to remove the swapfile without rebooting.  Linux (and most 
SVR4's) have had this functionality for a LONG time.  As it is, our BSD 
limitation of only swapping to the b slice of any particular partition is 
EXTREMELY frustrating in such situations where extra swap is temporarily 
needed.

Thanks, and keep up the great work!

---Jake



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