Performance Issues with AMD64 3000+, 1.5GB RAM, FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE

[Mark Kane]

Roland Smith wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 01:39:25PM -0500, Mark Kane wrote:
> 
> 
>>Wow, that would be really nice. I notice whenever I compress something 
>>like a backup of my Thunderbird Inbox files (several hundred megs) in 
>>bzip2 format it goes nowhere near 100% or even 90% CPU usage. The 
>>problems I am talking about occur even when CPU usage is real low as 
>>well. :-\
> 
> 
> Hmm, if bzip2 can't saturate the CPU, I would say it's probably waiting
> for disk reads/writes.

The drives I was trying to compress from/to are both brand new 200GB 
Maxtor 7200RPM ATA133 drives. Maybe that has something to do with the 
bad controller on this series of boards.

> <snip>
> 
>>   29  ??  WL     1:35.00 [irq19: skc0 atapci2]
> 
> 
> It looks like one of your disk controllers is sharing an interrupt with
> another device (network card? can't find a skc device, only sk). That
> might have something to do with your problem. Try disabling that device,
> and see if your troubles disappear. If so, you could try to add
> a device hint to have the skc device use another free interrupt
> line. See device.hints(5).

Looks like it is the network card. Would disabling that in the BIOS mess 
anything up in FreeBSD? With it disabled I couldn't test the streaming, 
but could try playing files.

[mixx941 at amd64:~]% dmesg | grep sk
skc0: <Marvell Gigabit Ethernet> port 0x9c00-0x9cff mem 
0xfb008000-0xfb00bfff irq 19 at device 11.0 on pci2
skc0: Marvell Yukon Lite Gigabit Ethernet rev. A3(0x7)
sk0: <Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. Yukon> on skc0
sk0: Ethernet address: 00:0f:ea:4f:83:8b

I'm also compiling STABLE on that other 5.4-RELEASE i386 machine that 
had the same problems while I was using it for that month. I'm going to 
see if that helps that machine out any. Here is the IRQ output from that 
machine:

    12  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq1: atkbd0]
    13  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq3: sio1]
    14  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq4: sio0]
    15  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq5:]
    16  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq6: fdc0]
    17  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq7: ppc0]
    18  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq8: rtc]
    19  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq9: acpi0]
    20  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq10:]
    21  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq11:]
    22  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq12: psm0]
    23  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq13:]
    24  ??  WL     0:01.94 [irq14: ata0]
    25  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq15: ata1]
    26  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq16:]
    27  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq17:]
    28  ??  WL     0:19.72 [irq18: rl0]
    29  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq19:]
    30  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq20:]
    31  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq21: uhci0 uhci1+]
    32  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq22: pcm0]
    33  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq23:]
    34  ??  WL     0:00.00 [irq0: clk]

-Mark