FreeBSD 5.x performance tips (ISC)

[Peter Losher]

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So, as many of you know ISC hosts a quad-Xeon server running FreeBSD 5.1
(-p10 to be precise) which hosts half of ftp.freebsd.org, etc.  Many of
you helped out with some teething pains w/ virtual memory sizes, and
kernel panics.  Thanks :)

The issue with the system now is that while the kernel is SMP-aware, and
as I watch 5.2-REL get downloaded today, this system is like the arm
muscle that is developed to lift that barbell, but not enough blood is
getting everywhere, so the barbell is slowly moving up while the muscle
cramps like hell.  In this case the system is ~70% idle, and around 150
processes are locked and the performance starts to seriously decrease
at times. (Entropy stops getting collected, etc.)  Not a pretty sight. 
The CPU's are all spinlocking on an I/O channel. so high I/O translates
into artificial high cpu and load averages.

So where can I look for pointers on how I can squeeze better performance
out of this configuration? I already have the usual sysctl entries
installed. Any chance moving to 5.2 will help the situation?

Best Wishes - Peter
- -- 
Peter_Losher at isc.org | ISC | OpenPGP Key E8048D08 | "The bits must flow"
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