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Date:      Mon, 3 Apr 2000 02:55:56 +0200
From:      "Marinos J . Yannikos" <mjy@pobox.com>
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   tuning the vm system / disk cache
Message-ID:  <20000403025556.S31173@TK147108.telekabel.at>

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I'm trying to reduce the number of disk accesses during database queries -
the database is very small, there's plenty of RAM available, and the queries
are simple SELECT queries (i.e. read-only). I am using the following kernel
options:

maxusers        256
options 		SOFTUPDATES
options         SHMMAXPGS=65536
options         SHMSEG=32

(the last 2 because I'm using postgres)

The whole database takes up approx. 12MB disk space, the system looks like
this:

Mem: 26M Active, 13M Inact, 25M Wired, 36K Cache, 12M Buf, 438M Free
Swap: 490M Total, 490M Free

The filesystem used is mounted with -o async (not that it should matter -
except perhaps for the logfiles, which only grow by a few 100 bytes per
second anyway).

Still, the disk seems to be accessed frequently during the queries:

k7# iostat 5
      tty             ad0             acd0              fd0             cpu
 tin tout  KB/t tps  MB/s   KB/t tps  MB/s   KB/t tps  MB/s  us ni sy in id
   1   88  0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  51  0  4  0 45
   0   15 96.26   9  0.86   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  86  0  7  0  6
   0   15 95.46  14  1.32   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  78  0  6  0 16
   0   15 85.39  12  1.02   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  85  0  6  0  9
   0   15 100.55  13  1.31   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  79  0  5  0 16
   0   16 97.71  12  1.18   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  83  0  5  0 12
   0   15 106.29  10  0.99   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  80  0  8  0 12
   0   16 100.16  18  1.72   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  77  0  5  0 18

Is there any way to force a more aggressive caching by the vm system? I have
looked at the sysctl variables, but my attempts at tuning them weren't very
successful.

Any input would be much appreciated.

-mjy
-- 
***==> Marinos J. Yannikos <mjy@pobox.com>
***==> http://pobox.com/~mjy


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