Some odd behaviour of vmstat and vmtotal...

[gnn at freebsd.org]

At Thu, 01 May 2008 15:22:12 +1000,
Andrew Snow wrote:
> 
> 
> > In deploying 7.0 at work we were finding a persistent problem when
> > running "vmstat 1" on systems.  The problem shows up as a 10ms "pause"
> > in processing, usually packet stamping and forwarding by a user level
> > process. 
> 
> Thats interesting.  I once did some quick and dirty profiling of vmtotal 
> and found it runs extremely quickly.  Are you running on slow machines 
> (embedded perhaps)?  Or do you have a situation where you perhaps have 
> alot more VM objects created than normal?  I can't think of a good 
> example where this would be the case..
> 

Doing a buildworld will cause you to see this.  It's all about how
many vm objects are on the list.

Best,
George