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

[Kris Kennaway]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> Brett Bump wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 14 Feb 2008, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>
>>> We are going to need more information about your system.  What do you
>>> mean by "peak activity"?  What is running on the system when it performs
>>> badly (check top -S, ps, gstat, vmstat -w, vmstat -i).  What is your
>>> kernel configuration, dmesg and relevant aspects of the system
>>> configuration?
>>>
>>> Kris
>>>
>>
>> I would call 120 processes with a load average of 0.03 and 99.9 idle
>> with 10-20 sendmail processes and 30 apache jobs nothing to write home
>> about.  But when that jumps to 250 processes, a load average of 30 with
>> 50% idle (5-10 second waits on single character ssh echo) a bit busy.
>> That usually means my heavy pop3 users are checking in at the same time
>> someone (or 2 or 3) have sent email to the large volume listservs.  Proc
>> stat doesn't show as much as gstat and iostat.  Gstat alwasy shows my
>> drive with /var/mail being 97-100% busy and iostat will always show hi
>> tps rates, but never anything above 8MB/s (4.10 gave me 30MB/s+).
>>
>> Kernel is generic with ipfirewall quota and smp (no ipfw rules yet).
> 
> OK, then you definitely need to update to 6.3, quota support in older 
> releases had performance problems.

Actually I am not sure it was possible to merge it to 6.x, it is 
definitely in 7.0 though.

Kris