What about if you have logging on?

Its constantly writing to the HD isnt it?  and im sure mp_logmessages =
1 doesnt help either.

-PM

Sindre wrote:

First of all, harddrive performance doesn't really affect hlds-performance,
except when changing maps. So just make sure DMA is enabled, and you're set to
go.
Second, what's this "1000 Hz" everyones talking about? It just doesn't make
any sense without specifying.

- Sindre



===== Original Message From Matt Heler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> =====
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Ok I've seen on this mailing list some tweaks by people.. Some good , some
bad.. some just plain crazy and dumb..

First off I'll give a few basic ones then get to advanced stuff later on
( probally in another e-mail to this list ) ..

- - -- Hard Drive --

First and foremost let me start with the slowest portion of a server, the
hard-drive. Basically in a nutshell hdparm is your best friend for this
scenario, use it if you have an ide drive ( if you have scsi then don't worry
about this since scsi is vastly superior to ide). To check your ide settings
run hdparm like this hdparm /dev/hda, this will bring up the current settings
of your ide drive. (mine look like this )

tribe BNR2 # hdparm /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount    = 16 (on)
IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
using_dma    =  1 (on)
keepsettings =  0 (off)
readonly     =  0 (off)
readahead    = 16 (on)
geometry     = 158816/16/63, sectors = 160086528, start = 0

To benchmark your drive before you apply tweaks to it , run hdparm -tT /dev/
hdX for me I get the following when I run that
        Timing buffer-cache reads:   1164 MB in  2.00 seconds = 581.03 MB/sec
        Timing buffered disk reads:  274 MB in  3.01 seconds =  91.13 MB/sec

Now for note, you optimally want your multicount and readahead to be the same
( hdparm -a and -m control theese seettings ) ( the higher the # for theese
the better , but each drive has its own multi-count and readahead limit  so
use hdparm -iI /dev/hdX to determine what it is ) , and for increasing io and
preformance you want unmarkirq and dma ON..  To adjust theese on your ide
drive simple issue the following for dma

hdparm -a1 /dev/hdX

and then for unmarkirq

hdparm -u1 /dev/hdX

for note you can combine all theese flags into one line , like this

hdparm -a1 -u1 /dev/hdX

(fairly e-z so far ) .. Now most of thoose settings that I gave you are the
safe settings , they generally work on most modern ide drives. Now if you
want to tweak more out of your drive you can issue the following ..

for write back caching issue ( this will increase the performance of writes
to the drive )

hdparm -W1 /dev/hdX

another is turning off , or setting acoustic management to its fastest
setting ( most newer drives now have this feature , if your running a
desktop leaving it on the default setting will make the drive quiet , but
for a server its useless and turning it to fastest will increase the io and
allow the drive to operate at a faster rpm speed )

hdparm -M254 /dev/hdX

Now run hdparm -tT /dev/hdX and check to see if your drive is faster ( it
should be much faster, then it was previously ). You can go further then this
with hdparm and play with more settings on it, but any other settings then
thoose I mentioned can gernerally be fairly dangerous and wreck havoc on your
drive and the contents within it.. O yes I forgot to mention that after you
reboot your server, you will need to re-apply your tweaks , since on reboot
the ide drive will revert back to it's normal default settings.

- - -- FileSystem --

Ok the next few tweaks basically vary depending on the filesystem your using.
If your using resierfs ( like I'm ) ... it's fairly known that if you want
the most performance you must mount your filesystem with the notail option.
However if your using ext3 ( like most redhat users are ) and have a new nice
and shiny 2.5 or 2.6 kernel then its also a known rule to add htree support
to your ext3 filesytem to speed things up.. I'll go into detail on how to add
this stuff .. but frist let me go over reiserfs ( since I use that , and I
like it ).

In a nutshell , your going to want to open up your /etc/fstab and modify your
your mount settings for reiserfs .. My recommended settings are to turn off
tail support and to also turn off access time updating. To turn theese off
change the follow example line like this.

if your reiserfs partiton looks like this..
/dev/hdb1       /tmp    reiserfs                defaults                0       0

your going to change it , to look like this
/dev/hdb1       /tmp    reiserfs                defaults,noatime,nodiratime,notail     
         0       0

With theese off, you should notice file deleting , creating and accessing
will seem speed up and or on roids =P

As for ext3 , there are several different tweaks and a few of them depend on
what kernel your using.. If your using a newer 2.5 or 2.6 kernel  ( or a
modified 2.4 kernel with htree support ) and have the latest e2fsprogs
packaged installed  then you can convert your ext3 to use htree's .. Htree's
are basically an indexed directory support for the ext3 filesytem, it offers
a considerable performance gain when used on a filesystem with directories
containing a large numbers of files ( hopefully I didnt confuse you there ).
Now if you know for a fact your kernel is up to date and supports htree's (
if you dont know then DO NOT try this, don't be stupid and assume it will
work ) then issue the following to make sure your e2fsprogs is at least 1.32

e2fsck -v , if its up to date ( at says its at least 1.32 ) , then issue this
to add htree support to ext3

tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/hdXXX

Voila your done, I recommend you reboot after you do this.. But you don't
have too.  Now If you feel outdated and dissapointed b/c you couldn't add
htree support to ext3, then don't worry htree ext3 users and non - htree
ext3 users can still add the no access time tweaks and thus still speed up
your ext3 or ext2 filesystem..

To add them basically edit /etc/fstab and follow how I change my examples

if your ext3 partiton looks simular to this..
/dev/hdb1       /tmp    ext3            defaults                0       0

then your going to change it , to look simular to  this
/dev/hdb1       /tmp    ext3            defaults,noatime,nodiratime             0      
 0

Now either reboot or remount your filesytem. Ok well that's enough for the
filesytem .. Next on the list is changing pci latency , setting up ntp ( for
syncing time , not really a tweak but its useful ) and then finally kernel
tweaks ( basically the do's and don't's for compiling a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel ,
yes that includes how to setup 1000hz amongst other things )

Matt
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