System perforamance 4.x vs. 5.x and 6.x

[Kris Kennaway]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>> Brett Bump wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>>
>>>> We are going to need more information about your system.  What do you
>>>> mean by "peak activity"?  What is running on the system when it 
>>>> performs
>>>> badly (check top -S, ps, gstat, vmstat -w, vmstat -i).  What is your
>>>> kernel configuration, dmesg and relevant aspects of the system
>>>> configuration?
>>>>
>>>> Kris
>>>>
>>>
>>> I would call 120 processes with a load average of 0.03 and 99.9 idle
>>> with 10-20 sendmail processes and 30 apache jobs nothing to write home
>>> about.  But when that jumps to 250 processes, a load average of 30 with
>>> 50% idle (5-10 second waits on single character ssh echo) a bit busy.
>>> That usually means my heavy pop3 users are checking in at the same time
>>> someone (or 2 or 3) have sent email to the large volume listservs.  Proc
>>> stat doesn't show as much as gstat and iostat.  Gstat alwasy shows my
>>> drive with /var/mail being 97-100% busy and iostat will always show hi
>>> tps rates, but never anything above 8MB/s (4.10 gave me 30MB/s+).
>>>
>>> Kernel is generic with ipfirewall quota and smp (no ipfw rules yet).
>>
>> OK, then you definitely need to update to 6.3, quota support in older 
>> releases had performance problems.
> 
> Actually I am not sure it was possible to merge it to 6.x, it is 
> definitely in 7.0 though.

I checked with the developer, and no-one running 6.x and quotas ever 
replied to multiple requests to test the patch.  It can be found here if 
you want to resolve this performance problem without upgrading to 7.0:

http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/quotagiant/quotas-RELENG_6-20070623-1455.patch

Kris