slow tar performance on fbsd5

[JG]

Hello,

I had to unpack a lot of tar archives and I occasional noticed terrible
bad performance on freebsd5.

This is my test file:

854251520 24 Sie 12:13 mysql-m.tgz

There are some real MySQL tables in it, it has been done with tar
-cvf. This archive contains about 146.000 small files. 

---------------------------------------
Unpacking it on FreeBSD5 gives me such results:

# time tar -xf mysql-m.tgz
2.130u 20.187s 7:02.69 5.2%     41+382k 13097+8205io 0pf+0w
...so 7 minutes of real time.

This is today's FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE but I also tried 5.4-release.

That server is brand new Dell PE2850 with Seagate ST373207L SCSI
drive, no raid. Parition is default UFS2 mounted with noatime, softupdates on.
This is Dual Xeon 2.8, 2GB ram.

My sysctls:
vfs.ufs.dirhash_maxmem=16777216 (much better than default 2MB)
machdep.hyperthreading_allowed=1 (better dd results)
kern.maxfiles=65536
kern.maxfilesperproc=65536
vfs.read_max=16

I've tried a few different kernels - I had results like 6-15 minutes
of real time. 6 minutes was the best.

I've also tried standard sysctls, and with/without make.conf cputype.
I've tested bsdtar and gtar from ports (btw. gtar seems to be faster).

I didn't noticed slowness of any other things on this server. I've quiet good DD results.

Diskinfo shows:
# diskinfo  -tv /dev/da3s1d
/dev/da3s1d
        512             # sectorsize
        73402366464     # mediasize in bytes (68G)
        143363997       # mediasize in sectors
        8923            # Cylinders according to firmware.
        255             # Heads according to firmware.
        63              # Sectors according to firmware.

Seek times:
        Full stroke:      250 iter in   3.107691 sec =   12.431 msec
        Half stroke:      250 iter in   2.223141 sec =    8.893 msec
        Quarter stroke:   500 iter in   3.595413 sec =    7.191 msec
        Short forward:    400 iter in   1.832164 sec =    4.580 msec
        Short backward:   400 iter in   2.047162 sec =    5.118 msec
        Seq outer:       2048 iter in   0.315528 sec =    0.154 msec
        Seq inner:       2048 iter in   0.320899 sec =    0.157 msec
Transfer rates:
        outside:       102400 kbytes in   1.341191 sec =    76350 kbytes/sec
        middle:        102400 kbytes in   1.536625 sec =    66640 kbytes/sec
        inside:        102400 kbytes in   2.731570 sec =    37488 kbytes/sec


Soon I'll be able to post results from my other server powered by
FreeBSD 4.11 with poor SCSI, maybe in the night.

----------------------------------------
This is result from Gentoo Linux on 2.6.x hardened kernel:
# time tar -xf mysql-m.tgz

real    1m3.944s
user    0m1.702s
sys     0m15.794s

Only ~one minute! Six times faster than on a FreeBSD. I'm not a linux
fan, and I don't want to tell you how good linux is, but I would to
find out what causes such bad results on my favourite FreeBSD...

This one is noname server with Dual Xeon 2.8, 2GB ram. It has
SATA Maxtor drive. Partition is ext3 -T news, -O dir_index, with
atime! I've similar results with ReiserFS.

------------------------------------------

Both systems was good optimized - as good as I can. All services (like
mysql, apache) was terminated before my tests. Both FreeBSD's
locate.updatedb and Gentoo's updatedb disabled.


Thank you for any opinions or hints how to tune FreeBSD a bit.

Best Regards,
JG