unstable 5.3 boxes

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Mike Tancsa wrote:

> At 06:29 PM 05/01/2005, Mitch Parks wrote:
> >It seems both my test and production boxes are not stable with 
> >5.3-Release. I'm hoping for some insight in how to make at least the 
> >production box not crash.
> >The crashes have been at different times of the day and I've found no 
> >suspicious log activity. At the moment it's been 9 days since the last 
> >crash, but it has also crashed in less than a day. ACPI and HT have always 
> >been enabled on this box without problems.
> 
> I would update to RELENG_5 and disable in the BIOS HTT.  HTT for the
> most part works against you with the current scheduler and seems to add
> more instability.  But there have been quite a few fixes in RELENG_5
> that you might benefit from. 

FYI, I had something of an odd surprise recently (about two weeks ago) 
when I re-benchmarked MySQL between HTT and non-HTT on a dual Xeon and got
a faster result with HTT on 6.x-CURRENT.  I've not yet investigated
sufficiently to figure out why I got that result, or if it's a consistent
result.  It may be the product of recent libpthread changes but I hope to
investigate further in a couple of weeks.  There was a slight regression
in the normal SMP numbers (maybe a couple of percent) but a massive
improvement in HTT...  My first goal will be to identify the source of the
SMP regression, the second to confirm and reason about the HTT change. 

Robert N M Watson