[call for helpers!] Tuning for the Beaver Challenge

[Mike Silbersack]

Bascially everything in section 2.2.3 (/etc/sysctl.conf) is wrong; some
values may need tweaking, but changing them blindly will not be helpful.
The one setting that I do suggest you keep is:

kern.ipc.somaxconn=512 (128 may be too low for http testing)

The settings from section 2.2.4 will _probably_ be ok, but you'll have to
run netstat -m after a benchmarking run to really know.  One setting which
you'll need to change for the apache2 run is kern.ipc.nsfbufs.
Unfortunately, -stable doesn't have any way to tell if you're running out,
so you'll have to just guess there.  Under -current, netstat -m will tell
you what you need to know.

Also, you'll probably want to increase KVA_PAGES from 256 to 512 so that
the kernel does not run out of memory.

Under section 2.2.7, take out the section talking about
CPU_FASTER_5X86_FPU through CPU_UPGRADE_HW_CACHE - none of these options
is going to help, and it will just increase the likelyhood that something
goes wrong.

In general, it appears that you can run most of the benchmarks locally, so
I suggest that you do that when trying to decide how to tweak settings.

For the threads-related benchmarks (volcanomark and apache2 with worker)
start asking for help on the -threads mailing list.  This is the one thing
that is likely to benefit from tweaking.

Mike "Silby" Silbersack

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Dung Patrick wrote:

> Hi
>
> Beaver Challenge 2004 is coming!.
> Details in http://osuosl.org/benchmarks/bc/
>
> We are preparing the tuning guide. Definitely we need suggestions and comments.
>
> Please see this forum to view the latest tuning guide:
> http://osuosl.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=8
>
> Attached is a ver0.4 of the tuning guide.
>
> Regards
> Patrick
>
>