OS suddenly VERY busy

[Toll, Eric]

> Subject: OS suddenly VERY busy
> 
> Hello!
> 
> After a couple of huge tarball extracts (`make extract' in

> jdk14 and jdk15) I noticed, things are a little slower. 
> During the extracts, the mouse was moving with visible
jerks. 
> Indeed, the system seems VERY busy:
> 
> The machine is idle and is not doing anything in
user-space 
> according to both top and vmstat's "pigs" display.
> 
> Yet it is noticably slower. Trying to compile something 
> pushes the load above 2. What is it doing?
> 
> This is a single-CPU Opteron running:
> 
> 	FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE #0: Fri Jun 10 09:11:30 EDT 2005
amd64
> 
> The box has 2Gb of RAM, but NO SWAP.
> 
> Any ideas? Thanks!
> 

Irq 15 is your IDE disk.  The slowest part of a server will
always be the disk, this is your bottleneck. I tried working
with jdk14:

(*and still cannot install it, will you post your install
sequence please?*)

Some of the files where large.  I noticed nothing really
performance wise when working with with some of the 50M plus
tar files.  I do have dual 242's and a 64bit 3Ware card (in
a 64Bit slot) that has harware XOR's in it so my cpu's never
have to do direct disk work per se.  One of the install
processes recommends you have 1.4Gb of free work space.
This may also be an issue. Why no swap partition?  Was this
intentional? Also how much RAM?  I have 1Gb.



What does df -h say? I have mine like this.  Raid 1 Array
with SATA drives.
I'm worried I made /var too small...

Filesystem       Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/twed0s1a    989M     93M    817M    10%    /
devfs            1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/twed0s1d    3.9G    458K    3.6G     0%    /tmp
/dev/twed0s1f    178G     18G    146G    11%    /usr
/dev/twed0s1e     39G    882M     35G     2%    /var