Re: Severe instabilities and system lockups
David Jackson wrote: I am still having severe problems with severe system instabilities with FreeBSD and have had these problrms in 7.1 and 8.0. The system randomly locks up, it appears applications lock up when they access the USb disk. Also, when accessing the USB disk, the entire system lockup often for minutes. Performance with accessing USB disks is horrendous,. it took 7 hours to copy a directory that was 200 MB. Any program that accesses the USB disk tend to freeze for minutes, and often the entire system becomes unresponsive for minutes. Overall FreeBSD here is characterized by severe instabilities, ive had better performance from Windows 98 systems. The fact that the entire system freezes up, this should not happen, a well designed system will not lock up the entire OS when accessing disk. Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has anyone else seen these problems with USB disks? Thank you for the reply to my concerns. I have been reading through them carefully. I seem to have also discovered that the lockup problems are not entirely due to USB issues. Many of them were being caused by an apparent problem with the swap system. I have two swaps, a file backed swap and a partition swap on the same disk. Apparently when having two swaps on the disk there are severe performance problems. FreeBSD needs to fix whatever is causing this thrashing problem. So far the lockups have seem to become much less severe since i have disabled the file based swap file. I may disable the partition swap but i do not know if it is possible to have the system boot with a file based swap only. Perhaps i can disable the partition swap after it boots. I am trying to copy a directory on the USB drive however and it does seem to be rather slow still. It started at 5:45 and is still going. I will see how long it takes. Again thanks for the help with these issues ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Severe instabilities and system lockups
On Mar 11, 2010, at 3:05 PM, David Jackson wrote: [ ... ] I seem to have also discovered that the lockup problems are not entirely due to USB issues. Many of them were being caused by an apparent problem with the swap system. I have two swaps, a file backed swap and a partition swap on the same disk. Apparently when having two swaps on the disk there are severe performance problems. FreeBSD needs to fix whatever is causing this thrashing problem. You're going to notice performance problems if you are paging heavily regardless of other factors. And the fine documentation recommends placing only one swap partition per disk (or controller): http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/configtuning-initial.html On larger systems with multiple SCSI disks (or multiple IDE disks operating on different controllers), it is recommend that a swap is configured on each drive (up to four drives). The swap partitions should be approximately the same size. The kernel can handle arbitrary sizes but internal data structures scale to 4 times the largest swap partition. Keeping the swap partitions near the same size will allow the kernel to optimally stripe swap space across disks. It might be reasonable for swapon to log or print a warning if it notices multiple swap partitions (or swapfiles) on the same underlying hardware device Regards, -- -Chuck ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Severe instabilities and system lockups
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 5:05 PM, David Jackson djackson...@gmail.comwrote: David Jackson wrote: I am still having severe problems with severe system instabilities with FreeBSD and have had these problrms in 7.1 and 8.0. The system randomly locks up, it appears applications lock up when they access the USb disk. Also, when accessing the USB disk, the entire system lockup often for minutes. Performance with accessing USB disks is horrendous,. it took 7 hours to copy a directory that was 200 MB. Any program that accesses the USB disk tend to freeze for minutes, and often the entire system becomes unresponsive for minutes. Overall FreeBSD here is characterized by severe instabilities, ive had better performance from Windows 98 systems. The fact that the entire system freezes up, this should not happen, a well designed system will not lock up the entire OS when accessing disk. Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has anyone else seen these problems with USB disks? Thank you for the reply to my concerns. I have been reading through them carefully. I seem to have also discovered that the lockup problems are not entirely due to USB issues. Many of them were being caused by an apparent problem with the swap system. I have two swaps, a file backed swap and a partition swap on the same disk. Apparently when having two swaps on the disk there are severe performance problems. FreeBSD needs to fix whatever is causing this thrashing problem. So far the lockups have seem to become much less severe since i have disabled the file based swap file. I may disable the partition swap but i do not know if it is possible to have the system boot with a file based swap only. Perhaps i can disable the partition swap after it boots. I am trying to copy a directory on the USB drive however and it does seem to be rather slow still. It started at 5:45 and is still going. I will see how long it takes. Again thanks for the help with these issues It's unclear how this system is being used, but if swap is being frequently accessed that's a problem your usage, not freebsd in particular. If your swap is being accessed frequently in any OS you should expect a serious performance hit. If that is the case you should investigate reducing memory usage/adding more in. -- Adam Vande More ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Severe instabilities and system lockups
David Jackson wrote: David Jackson wrote: I am still having severe problems with severe system instabilities with FreeBSD and have had these problrms in 7.1 and 8.0. The system randomly locks up, it appears applications lock up when they access the USb disk. Also, when accessing the USB disk, the entire system lockup often for minutes. Performance with accessing USB disks is horrendous,. it took 7 hours to copy a directory that was 200 MB. Any program that accesses the USB disk tend to freeze for minutes, and often the entire system becomes unresponsive for minutes. Overall FreeBSD here is characterized by severe instabilities, ive had better performance from Windows 98 systems. The fact that the entire system freezes up, this should not happen, a well designed system will not lock up the entire OS when accessing disk. Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has anyone else seen these problems with USB disks? Thank you for the reply to my concerns. I have been reading through them carefully. I seem to have also discovered that the lockup problems are not entirely due to USB issues. Many of them were being caused by an apparent problem with the swap system. I have two swaps, a file backed swap and a partition swap on the same disk. Apparently when having two swaps on the disk there are severe performance problems. FreeBSD needs to fix whatever is causing this thrashing problem. So far the lockups have seem to become much less severe since i have disabled the file based swap file. I may disable the partition swap but i do not know if it is possible to have the system boot with a file based swap only. Perhaps i can disable the partition swap after it boots. I am trying to copy a directory on the USB drive however and it does seem to be rather slow still. It started at 5:45 and is still going. I will see how long it takes. Again thanks for the help with these issues ___ I dont think its a good idea to have two swaps on any HD. If you used the default setup under sysinstall for FreeBSD it gives how the setup should look. Is the USB a current 2.0? I cant ever recall having the problems you are describing on a FreeBSD box ever. Maybe you have funky hardware configuration. ~Al Plant - Honolulu, Hawaii - Phone: 808-284-2740 + http://hawaiidakine.com + http://freebsdinfo.org + + http://aloha50.net - Supporting - FreeBSD 7.2 - 8.0 - 9* + email: n...@hdk5.net All that's really worth doing is what we do for others.- Lewis Carrol ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Severe instabilities and system lockups
I am still having severe problems with severe system instabilities with FreeBSD and have had these problrms in 7.1 and 8.0. The system randomly locks up, it appears applications lock up when they access the USb disk. Also, when accessing the USB disk, the entire system lockup often for minutes. Performance with accessing USB disks is horrendous,. it took 7 hours to copy a directory that was 200 MB. Any program that accesses the USB disk tend to freeze for minutes, and often the entire system becomes unresponsive for minutes. Overall FreeBSD here is characterized by severe instabilities, ive had better performance from Windows 98 systems. The fact that the entire system freezes up, this should not happen, a well designed system will not lock up the entire OS when accessing disk. Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has anyone else seen these problems with USB disks? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Severe instabilities and system lockups
Hi-- On Mar 8, 2010, at 8:52 AM, David Jackson wrote: I am still having severe problems with severe system instabilities with FreeBSD and have had these problrms in 7.1 and 8.0. The system randomly locks up, it appears applications lock up when they access the USb disk. Also, when accessing the USB disk, the entire system lockup often for minutes. Performance with accessing USB disks is horrendous,. it took 7 hours to copy a directory that was 200 MB. Any program that accesses the USB disk tend to freeze for minutes, and often the entire system becomes unresponsive for minutes. Overall FreeBSD here is characterized by severe instabilities, ive had better performance from Windows 98 systems. The fact that the entire system freezes up, this should not happen, a well designed system will not lock up the entire OS when accessing disk. Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has anyone else seen these problems with USB disks? You've asked the same question multiple times, but there is sufficient lack of details that you're not going to get good feedback. Put a dmesg from a clean boot, output of usbdevs -v, and maybe minimal testing with diskinfo -t /dev/DISK or dd if=/dev/DISK of=/dev/null bs=64k to see your effective transfer rates onto the web somewhere, and email links to this information. Also note that if you are unhappy with FreeBSD, by all means, feel free to use something else. You may also feel free to spare the list your opinions WRT a comparision to Win98. Regards, -- -Chuck ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Severe instabilities and system lockups
On Monday 08 March 2010 16:52:08 David Jackson wrote: Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has anyone else seen these problems with USB disks? You'll probably get a better response by asking on the freebsd-usb mailing list. The following debug nodes for USB in 8.0 are present: sysctl hw.usb | grep debug hw.usb.ehci.debug: 0 hw.usb.ohci.debug: 0 hw.usb.uhci.debug: 0 hw.usb.ctrl.debug: 0 hw.usb.umass.debug: 0 hw.usb.debug: 0 hw.usb.dev.debug: 0 hw.usb.ugen.debug: 0 hw.usb.uhub.debug: 0 hw.usb.proc.debug: 0 hw.usb.ulpt.debug: 0 hw.usb.ucom.debug: 0 hw.usb.uhid.debug: 0 hw.usb.ukbd.debug: 0 hw.usb.ums.debug: 0 Your first step should probably be to get a verbose boot log (boot -v) - one of the USB developers will likely know better than I do which sysctl debug nodes to set to get more details. -- Bruce Cran ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Severe instabilities and system lockups
David Jackson wrote: I am still having severe problems with severe system instabilities with FreeBSD and have had these problrms in 7.1 and 8.0. The system randomly locks up, it appears applications lock up when they access the USb disk. Also, when accessing the USB disk, the entire system lockup often for minutes. Performance with accessing USB disks is horrendous,. it took 7 hours to copy a directory that was 200 MB. Any program that accesses the USB disk tend to freeze for minutes, and often the entire system becomes unresponsive for minutes. Overall FreeBSD here is characterized by severe instabilities, ive had better performance from Windows 98 systems. The fact that the entire system freezes up, this should not happen, a well designed system will not lock up the entire OS when accessing disk. Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has anyone else seen these problems with USB disks? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org Don't ask me to fix anything because I have no idea, but I have seen this occasionally on one usb port and/or using a usb extender cable (I haven't tested properly yet) on my home desktop system. So I put it down to a hardware issue. All other ports work as expected. Is it an external hard drive, as opposed to pen drive etc? Have you tested with the supplied cable plugged directly into a usb port (no extender cable) including with the secondary power cable if it has one? Have you tested all your usb ports? Have you tested on other machines running FreeBSD? Finally, given your remark about windows 98, does your motherboard actually have USB 2? FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p1 regards Chris ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Severe instabilities and system lockups
Bruce Cran wrote: On Monday 08 March 2010 16:52:08 David Jackson wrote: Are there any diagnostic tools uch as getting a log of tranmissions on USB and probe it, ,or finmd out what code it is lockilng up on ?Has anyone else seen these problems with USB disks? You'll probably get a better response by asking on the freebsd-usb mailing list. The following debug nodes for USB in 8.0 are present: sysctl hw.usb | grep debug hw.usb.ehci.debug: 0 hw.usb.ohci.debug: 0 hw.usb.uhci.debug: 0 hw.usb.ctrl.debug: 0 hw.usb.umass.debug: 0 hw.usb.debug: 0 hw.usb.dev.debug: 0 hw.usb.ugen.debug: 0 hw.usb.uhub.debug: 0 hw.usb.proc.debug: 0 hw.usb.ulpt.debug: 0 hw.usb.ucom.debug: 0 hw.usb.uhid.debug: 0 hw.usb.ukbd.debug: 0 hw.usb.ums.debug: 0 Your first step should probably be to get a verbose boot log (boot -v) - one of the USB developers will likely know better than I do which sysctl debug nodes to set to get more details. Aloha, If the node is disappearing for the USB device and it is connected by a cable to the box try replace the cable. We had one here that would not stay listed on the hardware and it was the cable connector gone bad. I have never had a USB device lock up the box though. ~Al Plant - Honolulu, Hawaii - Phone: 808-284-2740 + http://hawaiidakine.com + http://freebsdinfo.org + + http://aloha50.net - Supporting - FreeBSD 7.2 - 8.0 - 9* + email: n...@hdk5.net All that's really worth doing is what we do for others.- Lewis Carrol ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
