5.4-prerelease - hanging under load

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Sunday,  3 April 2005 at 14:45:40 -0700, Nate Lawson wrote:
> Christian Brueffer wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 12:07:14PM -0400, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
>>> Christian Brueffer wrote:
>>>> On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 09:16:48PM -0500, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Since I upgraded from 5.3-stable to 5.4-prerelease, I've noticed that
>>>>> my computer is hanging badly under load. I've a P4 2.53 GHz without
>>>>> hyperthreading (no SMP). I use the same kernel configurations than
>>>>> before. Now when I compile a port for example, the mouse pointer hangs
>>>>> in Fluxbox and Mozilla takes forever (meaning ~5 sec) to refresh the
>>>>> screen. Even vi hangs. I do not see any warning/error message. Is it a
>>>>> known problem with 5.4?
>>>>
>>>> I have experienced something similar, putting the following into rc.conf
>>>> worked for me:
>>>>
>>>> performance_cpu_freq="HIGH"
>>>
>>> Yes, this seams to fix it. I didn't know that I had a laptop? :)
>>
>> Good to hear.
>>
>> Nate, this regression was introduced during the cpufreq and friends MFC.
>> Is switching the performance_cpu_freq default to HIGH the way to go for
>> 5.4-RELEASE?
>
> As you can see from etc/defaults/rc.conf on both -current and RELENG_5,
> we don't currently change the frequency at all:
>
> performance_cpu_freq="NONE"             # Online CPU frequency
> economy_cpu_freq="NONE"                 # Offline CPU frequency
>
> However, it sounds like his system's BIOS is booting up with a low
> acpi_throttle setting (probably the lowest one, 12.5% on many systems)
> and so he is seeing very slow performance.  (Only the acpi_throttle
> cpufreq driver has been MFCd for the 5.4 release and the others will
> follow the release.)  Initially, I thought it was safest not to even
> touch the frequency but it looks like it is necessary for some systems
> to always force it high by default.

I'm experiencing similar issues.  How can I confirm that this is the
case without rebooting the machine (which would be inconvenient)?  Is
there some sysctl that tells me?  I've taken a look, but I don't see
anything obvious.

Greg
--
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20050404/9e36039f/attachment.bin