When performing an update on the ports tree via "portsnap fetch update"
or when checking out (or) large Subversion repositories or when copying
large data files (~ 50 to 250 GB in size, results from numerical
modelings) or when compiling world, FreeBD 9.0 and FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE
tend to "freeze" for several seconds or drop overall performance
dramatically for seconds. On boxes with only console- or terminal access
(no GUI) a running 'vi' gets stuck for seconds while one of the
processes producing heavy I/O is running, or the output of a 'cat' of a
large file stops for several seconds.
Using X11, this phenomenon gets even worse and the 'freezing' tends to
persist sometimes for more than 10 or 15 seconds.
The boxes in question are all 64Bit, do have 2 to 8 CPUs/cores (no SMT)
and not less than 8 GB of RAM (the 8 core box is a dual socket Dell
server with two 4-core C2D-type XEON CPUs and 16 GB of RAM). All these
boxes uses ZFS filesystems for data along with UFS2 for the OS.
On a notebook with a relative modern Core-5 dual core CPU and 4 GB RAM
(running FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT/amd64), not ZFS, all UFS, with a 500GB
harddrive at 5400 upm (Dell Latitude E6510), this phenomenon is even
worse. Heavy disk I/O blocks the GUI for nearly half a minute, even when
no X11 is activated, the console gets stuck for a while. First I thought
this could be a problem with the "slow" harddrive, but I tried also a
Linux Ubuntu 11.04 on the box and forcing heavy I/O by copying the large
files in question from one location on the disk to another is performed
even faster and without any freezing of a console or GUI (used EXT4
filesystem).
I'm curious about this behavior. I use FreeBSD as my favourite HPC
platform as far as this is possible with FreeBSD, but I realized this
bottleneck when it comes to heavy I/O and I'd like to know whether this
is only a "superficial" phenomenon (like caused by the outdated X11
version FreeBSD use or a low priorized tty handling, means only the
observer "realize" a performance drop).
I've got not the time to investigate this deeper (I'd like to perform
some benchmarks on the notebook if it is available again, but my
knowledge on Linux/Ubuntu is very limited and the how-to setting up
FreeBSD and Linux to match each other on the same hardware could be tricky).
My kernel setups on FreeBSD are mostly the GENERIC kernel with extracted
drivers I do not use (like some USB devices, SAS/SCSI adaptors etc. we
do not use, et cetera), nothing special. Either way I follow the tips
presented in "tuning(7)" or not, the phenomenon is present.
Thanks,
Oliver
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