Is -current really this slow, or do I have something mis-configured?

[Willem Jan Withagen]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy at hub.org>
To: <freebsd-current at freebsd.org>
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 11:04 PM
Subject: Is -current really this slow, or do I have something mis-configured?


>
> I'm running -CURRENT on my desktop ... the machine is a P4, no HTT, and
> 512Meg of RAM ... and I swear the machine is less responsive then my
> laptop running on a Celeron 333 with ~192 Meg of RAM ... both are IDE
> drives, both are runing X and both are -current ...

If you are running -CURRENT with WITNESS and all other assert stuff then
there could be a serious "penalty" you pay. And there is a good reason for it:

Nota Bene:
Turn off WITNESS and INVARIANTS only
when benchmarking or for production systems
Robert Watson writes: "We turn them off in releases,
and once 5.x becomes 5-stable, we'll turn it off by default also. However,
they're invaluable tools when debugging the development system, so we have
them on in the development branch by default. I would encourage people to
generally run with them turned on unless performance of a system requires
them to be off, as it really helps the debugging process, as well as
helping to identify locking problems as the system evolves."


You might want to look at the stats I have for a simple bonnie run with and
without
the WITNESS stuff. Block Write throughput is not much different, but there is a
huge
difference when "fetching" data which was still in memory. I could very well
imagine
that a similar effect would impact your feel of responsiveness.
    http://freebee.digiware.nl/FreeBSD/NFS-performance/#bonnie-local

--WjW