Mark Knecht, mused, then expounded: > Hi all, > I'm wondering what folks who understand Linux configuration better > than I do about a problem like this. I run media all day while working > on my Gentoo/KDE box. The machine is generally over powered for 99% of > the work I do. It works _very_ hard when I kick off big numeric runs > (i.e. 100% usage for 2-30 minutes) but most of the time CPU usage is > running at <1-2% while I'm doing things like editing code and watching > a movie at the same time/ > > What I do notice however is that whether I'm watching NetFlix in a > VM or a movie on disk using VLC, when I insert a DVD I almost always > get a glitch of 1-2 seconds while the system figures out what to do > with the DVD. I see some CPU usage, but it's not like 12 processors go > to 100%. >
As no one has stepped in here...Pretty much everything I;m suggesting, you are going to hate. - Turn off that system sucking automount daemon. Hopefully, that fixes the issue for you. The rest are more drastic. Here are the important things for a VM host, in order of decreasing importance - 1) Storage - needs twice as much, must be fast. 7200 RPM SATA drives are acceptable for read only NFS stores. 2) Memory - all DIMM slots filled, 8GB 1600 PC3-DDR DIMMS minimum. Faster, lower latency, DIMMs preferred, but motherboard/bios may down clock them. 3) Network - Wide bandwidth (Probably not an issue for you). 10GigE minimum. Or bond at least 4 GigE ports to act as a single pipe. 4) CPU - Lower core count, 8-cores/socket max. More eats up I/O Bandwidth, adds latency, generates wait states. Better to oversubscribe the cpu than anything else. On an even more micro level - Storage - Make sure you have seperate drives for the OS - mostly read only), /var - mostly write, and /home - mostly read, light write. Typical setup would be a single SSD for the OS, RAID 1 for /var and whatever RAID you like for /home using 10K RPM SAS drives preferred. Use the proper file system - large sequential files: media, VM images, etc. need XFS. Small r/w files need - EXT3. Use a proper hardware RAID card - not a software raid. Proper hardware raid cards will require a x8 PCIe slot and cost a few hundred dollars. Reduce the cpu core count to 4 and offload your numeric compute requirements to a stack of RasberryPI compute engines, using your main system as a head node for the cluster. Bob -- -
