On 2022-04-26, Mike Larkin <mlar...@nested.page> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 02:13:16AM +0300, Mihai Popescu wrote: >> I can bear this since I'm not into large file transfer business. But >> here is another interesting fact: each time my disk is used by some >> file transfer, all the running applications, mostly GUI based are >> stalling - that includes mostly chromium ( even if it is not chromium >> that it does the disk data transfer).
I have found MP performance to be poor when doing lots of disk io, in my case noticed when doing multithreaded searches (the_silver_searcher) over unpacked source from the whole ports tree, making the machine often respond poorly when it was running (including lack of response to keyboard/mouse). > See comments below. The hardware is ancient. I'd say try running > chrome on windows on this hardware and you'll probably see it's also > horrible. Chrome runs reasonably well on other OS including Windows on much worse machines than this. >> avail mem = 7460139008 (7114MB) >> cpu0: AMD A8-5500B APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, 3194.45 MHz, [...] not bad really >> cpu1: disabling user TSC (skew=129) >> cpu2: disabling user TSC (skew=186) this is not ideal if you have software calling gettimeofday a lot. browsers often do. >> sd0 at scsibus1 targ 0 lun 0: <ATA, ST250DM000-1BD14, KC47> >> naa.5000c5006520feaf > > HDD, not SSD, and release date of this model is April 2011... Eleven years > ago. at least it's not SMR like many newer HDDs :) >From Mihai's description it really feels like it's disk io in particular that's causing the problem. Performance could well be better on OS with better developed SMP (I don't get the impression that disk io has really been a target area for our MP work). I am sure the #1 improvement will be replacing this with SSD, or adding SSD and moving those filesystems which see frequent access. (Even if the machine won't boot from NVMe directly, a cheap M.2 NVMe in a PCIe carrier card for /usr/local, /home, /tmp would have a good cost/benefit ratio). Alternatively this hardware will likely work better with another OS. Choice of OS is a trade-off.
