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

[Mark Kane]

Roland Smith wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 04:44:59PM -0500, Mark Kane wrote:
>>Okay, I may try that later then. STABLE is just about done on that 
>>Athlon XP 2000+ machine.
> 
> 
> Fingers crossed :-)

Well Hmmm.... I've got -STABLE running on the 5.4-RELEASE i386 AMD 
Athlon XP 2000+ machine with 256MB RAM. I untar Firefox sources, and the 
improvement is noticeable within 3 seconds. When doing the same 
operation before or here on my amd64 (5.4-RELEASE) it starts freezing 
the screen, sound, and other things (Hard to describe the sound noise, 
but it sounds like a "ERRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-R-R-R-R-RRRR" stutter).

I increased the XMMS buffer from 3000 to the value on your site (haven't 
done the sysctl one yet) and it made the skips that were happening 
during untarring reduce greatly. There are still a few skips and slight 
stuttering, but before when doing the same operation it was completely 
un-listenable and unresponsive.

I'm even tarring the Firefox source back up with bzip2 now to try. It's 
going quite slowly, but that's probably due to low RAM, as well as an 
older, slower, UDMA66 hard drive. 608K of real mem free and using up 
50MB of swap, it's still sounding pretty good with minimal skips.

I'm listening to a stream from my Athlon XP 2000+ in my left ear (via a 
headphone) and the same stream on the speakers here from my amd64. I 
hear occasional skips in the audio from the amd64 5.4-RELEASE box as I'm 
just typing this email, but while the other -STABLE box is semi-idle (X, 
Xfce, Firefox with 40 tabs open) I don't hear many skips at all. It's 
not perfect, but a huge improvement.

I'm wondering what changed in 5-STABLE to make this so much better. I 
thought the fix was in 6 (Unless it was MFC)?

This much improvement almost makes me want to just upgrade this amd64 
box to -STABLE and start using it now. I just want to be sure it's 
stable enough for my use.

Thanks again for all the input :).

-Mark