Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 12:21:26 -0800 From: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au> To: Robin Cutshaw <robin@XFree86.Org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Build timings - FreeBSD 4.2 vs. Linux Message-ID: <200102192021.f1JKLQr61572@mobile.wemm.org> In-Reply-To: <20010219134043.A8347@intercore.com>
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Robin Cutshaw wrote: > > We just got a couple of Compaq 8500 quad Xeon PIII 700 boxes as daily > build servers for the XFree86 tree. I loaded SuSE Linux 7.0 on one > box and FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE on the other. I was surprised to see the > large difference in build times. The Linux box compiled in 1 hour and > 4 minutes. The FreeBSD box built in 2 hours and 50 minutes. I did > stock builds with no parallelization turned on for either. > > Any ideas as to why it would take almost three times longer to build > on FreeBSD? This is probably a silly question, but you did recompile the kernel for SMP, right? Have you tuned the FreeBSD kernel? It still ships with a worst-case configuration so that it runs optimally on i386 cpus. :-( Copy GENERIC to something else and remove all but 'cpu i686', rebuild and install. Also, get rid of 'sl', and 'ppp' from the kernel config as that messes up certain things (interrupt masks). Ideally, do a proper cleanup and configure it for your specific hardware (ie: remove all the other ethernet drivers, etc). > I'm sure that there are several things that can be done to make this > faster (like do parallel builds) but I wanted to get the stock behaviour > close before doing the parallel work. A couple of possibilities.. If you want to compare the two side by side, try mounting the freebsd filesystems in async mode, just like linux does by default. In particular, make sure you get /tmp, /var/tmp and wherever your build is. However, I'd recommend softupdates instead of async for longer term stability. It may not be quite as fast, but it should be pretty close to async mode. > Thanks, > Robin Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm - peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com; peter@netplex.com.au "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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