8-STABLE performance issues on Supermicro Core i7

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 09:40:13PM -0500, Bryce Edwards wrote:
> I've got a new Supermicro X58 system with an Intel Core i7 930 with 6
> GB ram that is not performing nearly as fast as it should in many ways
> (compiling, network transfers).

By the way, an interesting thread you might read -- yes it's long.
Subject "Only 70% of theoretical peak performance on FreeBSD 8/amd64,
Corei7 920":

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-April/thread.html#56253

The performance stats you're providing are much lower than 70% peak, so
I'm not sure there's a correlation, but that's a thread which did bring
up odd performance-affecting changes in the i5/i7 architecture:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-April/056332.html

It's also hard to determine from the thread given its length, but I
believe pinning a process to an individual CPU increased (~20%+) the OPs
performance.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-April/056316.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-April/056339.html

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |