FreeBSD 5.x performance tips (ISC)

[Peter Losher]

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So, as many of you know ISC hosts a quad-Xeon server running FreeBSD 5.1
 (-p10 to be precise) which hosts half of ftp.freebsd.org, etc.  Many of you 
helped out with some teething pains w/ virtual memory sizes, and kernel 
panics.  Thanks :)

The issue with the system now is that while the kernel is SMP-aware, and as I 
watch 5.2-REL get downloaded today, this system is like the arm muscle that 
is developed to lift that barbell, but not enough blood is getting 
everywhere, so the barbell is slowly moving up while the muscle cramps like 
hell.  In this case the system is ~70% idle, and around 150 processes are 
locked and the performance starts to seriously decrease at times. (Entropy 
stops getting collected, etc.)  Not a pretty sight.  The CPU's are all 
spinlocking on an I/O channel. so high I/O translates into artificial high 
cpu and load averages.

So where can I look for pointers on how I can squeeze better performance out
of this configuration? I already have the usual sysctl entries installed.
Any chance moving to 5.2 will help the situation? 

Best Wishes - Peter
- --
Peter_Losher at isc.org | ISC | OpenPGP 0xE8048D08 | "The bits must flow"
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