9.1 AMD64 multitasking efficiency low

[CeDeROM]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 5:08 PM, CeDeROM <cederom at tlen.pl> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 5:00 PM, Bernhard Fröhlich <decke at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> VBox itself also needs some RAM and the emulated Graphics Card which
>> can easily be 128M per VM.
>
> This is what I get with CP and one VBox running - memory use is not
> that high but the responsiveness is getting low now:

I am now almost sure that these delays are caused by IO and/or MEMORY
operations because I can see dramatical decrease in responsivness
when:

1. I have constant IO operations provided by copying ~250GB of data
from/to external drive. Copying takes really lots of time and slows
down the whole system noticably.

2. When any bigger application starts whole system slows down - i.e.
my xorg/xfce4 keeps me waiting some seconds for action, still i can
hear fluent mp3 stream behind. After application is loaded it works
pretty fine until it starts operating on a data or unloads. When VBox
starts the vmachine I get terrible glitches, then when everything is
loaded system and vmachine works fine until it needs to load something
that again slows down the whole system, then when I want to shut down
the machine it gets unresponsive.

3. When the swap starts working things also gets really bad.

I can work on VESA xorg driver, I can have no multimedia drivers, but
the system performance is really important factor for me and working
like this is really unpleasant on a pretty modern machine :-( I dont
want to even think to switch to Ubuntu :-P Any hints on how to fix
this situation are highly welcome :-)

-- 
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info