Odd buildworld and installworld problems
Greetings, We have been attempting to upgrade several servers from 6.2 to 6.3. We have been using a shared source tree on an nfs mount to both build and install our systems. We run a mix of virtual and physical servers in our environment. Our physical systems are all dual-xeon machines running an SMP kernel and our virtual machines are all single processor systems running single processor kernels. We have successfully upgraded 19 systems so far using source compiled on one of our virtual machines (single processor) including 7 of our physical servers. So we built the source and kernels on a shared nfs mount on one virtual machine, mounted that share as /usr/src with a shared obj tree as well and successfully installed both source and kernels on 19 machines, including 7 dual processor physical servers. The problem comes now that installworld will no longer complete on any new server. We have downloaded and recompiled new source, created new obj trees and still run in to sporadic failures with installworld on new virtual machines. I have tried compiling the source on another virtual machine as well as on a physical server but I am still having sporadic failures on installworld. it will fail giving a no such file or directory error genenerally in bsnmpd. So the question is, has anyone seen errors like this? Would compiling source and kernels on an SMP physical server cause install problems on a single processor virtual-machine? Vice-Versa? thanks Steve B -- --- Steven H. Baeighkley - Systems Administrator FRII [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (970) 212-0756 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: **questions** Re: serious performance problems with 6.2 Release
If bugs is the correct list then that's where we'll send it. However we were not initially thinking it was a bug. We were thinking it was a configuration error on our part. We certainly weren't expecting kernel patches, just advice on where next to proceed. Thanks for the send-pr suggestion. We have verbose dmesg logs for all of our testing, I didn't want to send them initially because they are large and we have 12 of them. thanks Steve B Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: - Original Message - From: Freminlins [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2007 8:49 AM Subject: Re: serious performance problems with 6.2 Release On 15/02/07, Ted Mittelstaedt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: please use send-pr and include a dmesg output with debugging turned on, and exact model of motherboard and bios revision. questions isn't for bugs. I don't mean to be rude but you won't get the problem fixed by bitching about it on this mailing list. Ignore Ted. There is nothing wrong with your post to questions. There wasn't any bitching. Your post was very appropriate. Indeed, all you askedin the end was please help. You won't get that from Ted. We are all ears for your suggestions to help him fix this, Frem. I'm sure we all expect to see some kernel patches from you any day now. Please review the charter of this list. If this was supposed to be fixed on a mailling list, freebsd-bugs would be at least a bit closer to the mark. To the Original Poster - no, what you are seeing is not appropriate behaviour for the operating system. Yes, it is a defect. No, you won't see any patches to fix the behavior from the yahoos that post here. As I said originally, you need to use send-pr. Defects that are specific to hardware that are not documented in the PR database generally do not get fixed. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- --- Steven H. Baeighkley - Systems Administrator Front Range Internet, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (970) 212-0756 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
serious performance problems with 6.2 Release
Greetings, We are having some bizarre performance problems on a freshly installed 6.2 Release server. This is a supermicro superserver 6022c dual 2.0 Xeon with 2GB RAM. These CPUs do support hyperthreading. We have done significant testing with both hyperthreading turned on and off in the bios and in the OS, to no avail. The server is configured as a web server with apache 2.2.4 php 5.2.0 and ZendOptimizer. We are running proftpd 1.3.1rc1 and perl 5.8.8. We have another server running 4.11 with the same exact hardware and software versions. We have updated to the newest bios that Supermicro provides. The trouble is that the 6.2 box performs significantly worse than the 4.11 server. The load on the 6.2 server is regularly between 2.0 and 6.0. The load on the 4.11 server is between .57 and 1 despite often servicing more connections. We began this process to upgrade into the 6 tree because 4 is EOL. We kept the old 4.11 drive from this machine and when replacing it into the box performance is excellent just like our other 4.11 box. We have tired multiple tuning variables as recommended by both FreeBSD and apache and tried the recommendations in the 6.2 errata as well. The 6.2 errata states that kern.ipc.nmbclusters=0 will help the kernel memory allocator properly deal with high network traffic. We tried this and initially thought that the box was showing wonderful performance, but then we realized that the box was not allowing much network access at all. A single ssh and proftpd connection were all it would accept. Apache wouldn't even start giving a MaxClients error. Removing this option returned it to functional though poor performance mode. Are we missing something with how to use this variable? IS this expected behavior? This particular hardware does display some oddities on both machines, running either 6.2 or 4.11. We know that FreeBSD has hyperthreading turned off by default. We have done some additional testing with hyperthreading turned on in the OS, but we wish for it to remain off due to security concerns. If we disable hyperthreading in the bios and have it disabled in the OS then FreeBSD sees one physical and one logical processor (from dmesg) and only uses processor 0. If we enable hyperthreading in the bios and leave it disabled in the OS it will show 4 CPUs but only use 0 and 2. Top will show that there is 50% idle CPU despite the fact that the box is 100% loaded, CPU 1 and 3 are idle. We would expect that FreeBSD would not see logical processors when hyperthreading was disabled in either the BIOS or the OS. This may just be a communication problem between the BIOS and FreeBSD, but we don't see this behavior on other supermicro servers with hyperthreading. VMSTAT, NETSTAT, NFSSTAT and FSTAT show similar numbers between both servers, certainly nothing that would explain why a single httpd process requires 20% of a CPU on the 6.2 box and only 5-7% on the 4.11, but we could easily be missing something. We suspected NFS or disk bottlenecks, but ran IOZONE tests and found that the 6.2 box is actually having better performance on nfs and disk access. We are running a slightly customized SMP kernel with device polling enabled. The only bottleneck apears to be CPU usage, which works fine on 4.11. From what we've read we should not be seeing these performance problems with 6.2. So what are we missing? We assume its something stupid that will fix this problem quickly and easily, but so far, despite all the resources, we have been unable to find a problem with enough in common with our own to suggest possible solutions. Please Help. thanks Steve B -- --- Steven H. Baeighkley - Systems Administrator Front Range Internet, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (970) 212-0756 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
