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

[Chris]

On 26/08/05, Mark Kane <mark at mkproductions.org> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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Try these in kernel

OPTIONS DIRECTIO
OPTIONS NO_ADAPTIVE_MUTEXES

and commenting options        ADAPTIVE_GIANT
and disable apic.

Tell me if that imporves or makes worse.

Chris