5.4-prerelease - hanging under load

[Christian Brueffer]

On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 02:45:40PM -0700, Nate Lawson wrote:
> Christian Brueffer wrote:
> >On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 12:07:14PM -0400, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
> >
> >>Christian Brueffer wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 09:16:48PM -0500, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>Since I upgraded from 5.3-stable to 5.4-prerelease, I've noticed that 
> >>>>my computer is hanging badly under load. I've a P4 2.53 GHz without 
> >>>>hyperthreading (no SMP). I use the same kernel configurations than 
> >>>>before. Now when I compile a port for example, the mouse pointer hangs 
> >>>>in Fluxbox and Mozilla takes forever (meaning ~5 sec) to refresh the 
> >>>>screen. Even vi hangs. I do not see any warning/error message. Is it a 
> >>>>known problem with 5.4?
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>I have experienced something similar, putting the following into rc.conf
> >>>worked for me:
> >>>
> >>>performance_cpu_freq="HIGH"
> >>>
> >>>- Christian
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>Yes, this seams to fix it. I didn't know that I had a laptop? :)
> >>
> >
> >
> >Good to hear.
> >
> >Nate, this regression was introduced during the cpufreq and friends MFC.
> >Is switching the performance_cpu_freq default to HIGH the way to go for
> >5.4-RELEASE?
> >
> >- Christian
> >
> 
> As you can see from etc/defaults/rc.conf on both -current and RELENG_5, 
> we don't currently change the frequency at all:
> 
> performance_cpu_freq="NONE"             # Online CPU frequency
> economy_cpu_freq="NONE"                 # Offline CPU frequency
> 
> However, it sounds like his system's BIOS is booting up with a low 
> acpi_throttle setting (probably the lowest one, 12.5% on many systems) 
> and so he is seeing very slow performance.  (Only the acpi_throttle 
> cpufreq driver has been MFCd for the 5.4 release and the others will 
> follow the release.)  Initially, I thought it was safest not to even 
> touch the frequency but it looks like it is necessary for some systems 
> to always force it high by default.
> 
> I'll change the default to HIGH so that we always put systems in the 
> fastest performance mode by default.  It will be MFCd quickly as well.
> 

Great, thanks!

- Christian

-- 
Christian Brueffer	chris at unixpages.org	brueffer at FreeBSD.org
GPG Key:	 http://people.freebsd.org/~brueffer/brueffer.key.asc
GPG Fingerprint: A5C8 2099 19FF AACA F41B  B29B 6C76 178C A0ED 982D
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