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Date:      Mon, 12 Feb 2001 16:22:37 -0800
From:      Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il>, Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: soft updates performance 
Message-ID:  <79723.982023757@winston.osd.bsdi.com>
In-Reply-To: Message from Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>  of "Tue, 13 Feb 2001 09:53:00 %2B1030." <20010213095300.D2178@wantadilla.lemis.com> 

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> In fact, it's exactly the opposite.  'make world' is CPU-bound, so the
> speed of the I/O system is irrelevant.  If it were I/O bound, soft
> updates *would* make a difference, because a number of unnecessary
> writes would be eliminated.

Actually, I have measured that after a certain point make world *is*
I/O bound and you can't really get any faster unless you do something
to the I/O subsystem.  We have several quad Xeons here, and back when
I was more interested in measuring this sort of thing I found that I
could get a "worldstone" time of around 37 minutes with -j8 and all 4
processors churning away.  This was also during the exclusively BGL
days of -current and things may scale slightly better or worse now, I
dunno, but what I did find was that I could drop this all to something
more like 23 minutes simply by putting /usr/src and /usr/obj into MFS
(the machine I used also has a gigabyte of memory so this isn't
difficult to do).  That implies to me, at least, that after a certain
point the CPU is going to be the bottleneck.

- Jordan


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