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Date:      Wed, 7 Mar 2001 09:32:50 -0800 (PST)
From:      Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>
To:        Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>
Cc:        Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>, Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@FreeBSD.ORG>, dougb@FreeBSD.ORG, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: harvest_interrupt=YES slows down machine 
Message-ID:  <200103071732.f27HWou70340@earth.backplane.com>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0103080020001.2722-100000@besplex.bde.org>  <200103071437.f27EbmR59707@gratis.grondar.za>

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:> causes 7750 interrupts/sec here (on a Celeron 366 overclocked to
:> 522).  The random task takes 100% of the available cpu cycles.  This
:> slows down cpu-bound processes by a factor of about 3.5.  With a block
:> size of 64k instead of the default of 512, this causes only 300
:> interrupts/sec.  The random task takes a measly 27% of the cpu to
:> process these.  It can apparently only handle about 10 interrupts/second
:> with a reasonable overhead (1%).
:
:OK. Try tweaking the "Computational intensity factor" ;-) by dropping
:the kern.random.yarrow.bins:
:
:# sysctl -w kern.random.yarrow.bins=2
:
:And let me know how well that works.
:
:M
:-- 
:Mark Murray

    I think it would be a much better idea to cap the number of interrupts
    per second the reseeder accepts.  e.g. have a sysctl to set the 
    max and default it to something reasonable, like 200.  The seeder would
    thus only run 200 times a second even if A person were getting
    7750 interrupts/sec.  Frankly, once we have a good random seed it would
    only take about 10 interrupts a second to keep the random number 
    generator in good shape, and possibly even less.  Overkill is not 
    necessary.

							-Matt


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