SuperMicro i7 (UP) - very slow performance

[Ian Smith]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:12:30 +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote:
 > On 2010-Sep-21 20:02:09 -0700, Bryce <bryce at bryce.net> wrote:
 > >On Sep 20, 6:17 am, peterjer... at acm.org (Peter Jeremy) wrote:
 > >> On 2010-Sep-18 08:32:32 -0500, Bryce Edwards <br... at bryce.net> wrote:
 > >>
 > >> >I have a Supermicro with the C7X58 motherboard and an i7 930 cpu, and
 > >> >it is nowhere near the performance it should be.  A buildworld just
 > >> >took 22.5 hours!
 > 
 > >> - md5 -t   [this will help determine if the problem is lack of CPU]
 > >
 > >MD5 time trial. Digesting 100000 10000-byte blocks ... done
 > >Digest = 766a2bb5d24bddae466c572bcabca3ee
 > >Time = 5.421381 seconds
 > >Speed = 184454848.000000 bytes/second
 > 
 > I think something is badly wrong here.  That's less than 1/2 the speed
 > of my Athlon 4850e (2.5GHz) and only 60% more than my Atom N270.  None
 > of the other figures you posted look anomolous.  Are you sure the CPU
 > is actually running at full speed and you haven't done something like
 > disable the caches in BIOS?

It seems far more than just CPU performance is awry.  Adam's data from 
his i7 shows 2.7 times Bryce's speed for the md5 -t, maybe a lower EST 
rate? - but that could no way account for buildworld taking 22.5 hours.

Recent buildworld (albeit i386) on my Thinkpad T23 ran just shy of 3.5 
hours, without -j on an 1133MHz P3-M, 768MB of 133MHz RAM, 5400rpm UFS 
disk - with X/KDE running meanwhile (~5-7% CPU penalty).

cheers, Ian