Performance Issues with AMD64 3000+, 1.5GB RAM, FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE
Mark Kane
mark at mkproductions.org
Thu Aug 25 03:16:58 GMT 2005
Hi everyone. Last night I finally worked out some issues with my AMD64
machine and got it up and operational. It's an AMD64 3000+ with 1.5GB
RAM, and five 7200RPM hard drives (total of 720 gigs) running FreeBSD
5.4-RELEASE (amd64). When doing testing and initial
install/configuration of this machine (compiling apps and such) I didn't
notice this too much, but now that I'm actually using it this is
starting to be noticeable.
The issue I'm having is that every minute or two, I will hear some
stuttering in any audio/video playback (will see the video freeze if
video), and my mouse will freeze for a few seconds as well while this
happens. It seems to happen more frequently if I have something doing
disk I/O, such as downloads running, untarring files, or torrents. Right
now, I have the following applications open:
Xorg
Xfce
X-Chat
Mozilla Firefox (Only about 10 tabs, as opposed to my normal 40-50 tabs)
Terminal
XMMS
Mozilla Thunderbird
rtorrent
I initially noticed it on this machine when untarring a 20MB tar.bz2
file, and I figured with it untarring that a little audio stuttering
would be expected. Then today, I started noticing it when doing normal
things. All I'm doing now is just light browsing with XMMS and X-Chat
open, and maybe one download going.
While my AMD64 was out of commission, I was using an Athlon XP 2000+
with 1GB of RAM and an old slower hard drive. It ran FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE
as well. I noticed the same stutters in audio/video playback and
freezing of the mouse there, although it was much more frequent.
Here is a top output from just now:
last pid: 59025; load averages: 0.07, 0.08, 0.12
59 processes: 1 running, 58 sleeping
CPU states: 4.3% user, 0.0% nice, 2.3% system, 1.6% interrupt, 91.8%
idle
Mem: 841M Active, 245M Inact, 194M Wired, 72M Cache, 162M Buf, 2300K Free
Swap: 3045M Total, 96K Used, 3045M Free
So basically I'm wondering if there are any OS optimizations or anything
I am missing to reduce this? I'm not sure why on this type of hardware
with not even using half of what I normally would have open (at least
Firefox tabs wise) it would cause so many hiccups like this.
Thanks in advance for any opinions or suggestions.
-Mark
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