recent performance problems?

[John Baldwin]

On 07-May-2003 Glenn Johnson wrote:
> On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 10:22:20PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 7 May 2003, W. Josephson wrote:
>>
>> > On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 09:40:19PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>> >
>> > > On Wed, 7 May 2003, W. Josephson wrote:
>> > >
>> > > > On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 08:51:09PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>> > > >
>> > > > > Do the recommendations in UPDATING help you guys at all?
>> > > >
>> > > > I'm not quite sure what you are after
>> > >
>> > > Did you actually read /usr/src/UPDATING?
>> >
>> > yes.  Do you actually care about having feedback on -CURRENT?
>>
>> Yes we do. That's why I asked. Which of the options suggested in
>> UPDATING did you try, and what were the results?
> 
> In my case I have all of the debugging options off as per UPDATING.  I
> think I have a system with a different twist though.  Here is the uname
> output:
> 
> FreeBSD 5.1-BETA #2: Tue May  6 10:38:29 CDT 2003    
> root at node1.cluster.srrc.usda.gov:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/CLUSTER-FW 
> 
> When I first boot the system up it is fine.  However, it slows down
> after a period of time.  Within a few hours it is essentially unusable.
> It does not seem to be a gradual slowdown but I do not know how to
> quantify that.  I did find the following in /var/log/messages after the
> most recent slowdown:
> 
> May  6 19:52:21 node1 kernel: swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: device: twed0s1b, blkno: 408,
> size: 4096
> 
> The system had been up for about four and a half hours and the time
> stamp above corresponds to when the slowdown occurred.  Now, I could be
> having problems with the 3-Ware RAID card or this could be the same
> thing that others are reporting.  Anyway, I thought I should share that
> as it might provide a clue to someone.

It sounds like perhaps a lock is being held across sleep or some such.
Have you tried running the system with WITNESS and INVARIANTS turned on?

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/