Big problems with 7.1 locking up :-(

[Kris Kennaway]

Pete Carah wrote:
> Kris writes:
> 
>> You and anyone else seeing performance problems should try to work 
>> through the advice given here:
> 
> 
>   > http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/Help_my_system_is_slow.pdf <http://people.freebsd.org/%7Ekris/scaling/Help_my_system_is_slow.pdf>
> 
> Well,  all the people in this thread have noticed that WITH NO CONFIG CHANGES from configs
> that worked fine in the past, their systems are very slow and/or locking up (mine are both) with 
> the stable branch sometime (I noticed it sometime in December, but it got worse with the release.)  
> Most were OK in October; mine (I think) were OK in late November - may narrow things down?  Two of my 
> systems that lock up have no internal visibility when they do (Soekris 4801's routing; the only
> time-intensive things running are routing (done in irq context) and pflog.  These run with 60+
> meg ram free.)  These are complete lockups, though I did manage to get a ps out of my laptop last 
> night by waiting 20 _minutes_ for it to start (!).  This is not a generic performance problem.  The laptop
> had 55 minutes of cpu time in the softdepflush thread after being up about an hour and 10 mins;
> this might give a hint.  I didn't spot LL/RL state threads at the same time because I didn't know
> to.  Now I do.  BTW - the same ps showed 8 or so user-space procs in R state with NO cpu time; the
> kernel was hogging all of it for over an hour.
> Firefox did indeed trigger this one as someone else noted.  A soekris doing only routing+nat has no such
> excuse...  At least PHK was nice enough to note the watchdog in another thread :-)

Actually, there have been several apparently different problems reported 
in this thread, some of which (including the message I replied to) *are* 
generic "my system is slower" problems.

For generic "my system hangs" problems, see the chapter on kernel 
debugging in the handbook or follow the (same) advice given by Robert 
earlier in the thread.

Kris