System perforamance 4.x vs. 5.x and 6.x

[Mike Tancsa]

At 03:09 PM 2/14/2008, Brett Bump wrote:


>On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, Mike Tancsa wrote:
>
> > At 02:22 PM 2/14/2008, Brett Bump wrote:
> >
> > >I've recently upgraded a mailserver from a 4.x version to 6.2.
> >
> > I would say move to 6.3R as its a better release with a lot of bug
> > fixes.  In terms of your general performance issues, choice of
> > hardware really makes a difference as quality of drivers can be an
> > issue.  You might have a really awesome controller that works well on
> > Windows or LINUX, but does not do so well under FreeBSD because there
> > isnt any good driver support for it.
>
>Again, that isn't diagnosing the problem as much as just saying that 5.0
>through 6.2 were all bad releases???


No, but you havent given the list much to go on as to what the 
problems are or what hardware you are using, or really quantified the 
issue. By "slow" is the disk blocking on IO ? or are processes 
blocking on network IO etc etc.  6.2 was not a "bad" release, but 6.3 
is better than 6.2.  By starting with a more contemporary release, 
less effort by developers and other users need to be exerted in 
figuring out if the problem(s) you are running into have already been fixed.


>I doubt that can be the case.  Why
>would the driver support for this machine (working FLAWLESSLY on 4.10)
>now have bad drivers (this machine has been running 4.x for 4 years).


Because the drivers have changed since 4.10.  "improvements" could 
have introduced regressions... Change in the driver to support newer 
versions of a chipset might break older chipsets.


> > >I'm seeing signal 6's on apache and imapd (never happened before)
> >
> > Did you do a fresh install or did you try and migrate from RELENG_4
> > to RELENG_6 ?  What network card are you using ? What are the errors
> > (CRC?).  How about a dmesg from the box.
>
>bge0: Broadcom BCM5704 A2, ASIC rev. 0x2002
>bge1: Broadcom BCM5704 A2, ASIC rev. 0x2002

bge is a good example of a driver that has had a lot of changes and 
hasnt worked all that well at times.... hence the suggestion to try 
6.3 as there have been many bug fixes.  Whether or not it fixes your 
problem its hard to say, but start there to see if things are faster 
and stable for you etc.
e.g.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/bge/if_bge.c

You should also post a full dmesg of the box as well as kernel config etc...

what does
netstat -ni
give
and what options do you have on ifconfig ?  Are the errors seen on 
your switch port as well or just in netstat -ni ?



>-bash-2.05b$ dmesg
>pid 31611 (milter-greylist), uid 25: exited on signal 3
>pid 43464 (httpd), uid 80: exited on signal 6
>pid 86995 (imapd), uid 2151: exited on signal 6
>pid 85706 (httpd), uid 80: exited on signal 6
>pid 87600 (imapd), uid 1376: exited on signal 6
>pid 45621 (httpd), uid 80: exited on signal 6
>pid 45617 (httpd), uid 80: exited on signal 6
>
>The greylist entry is a standard 3am cron restart.



Why are the processes sigabrting ? Is there anything in the 
application logs to indicate why they are exiting ?

         ---Mike