Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 22:16:51 -0500 From: Mark Kane <mark@mkproductions.org> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Performance Issues with AMD64 3000+, 1.5GB RAM, FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE Message-ID: <430D3823.9070301@mkproductions.org>
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Hi everyone. Last night I finally worked out some issues with my AMD64 machine and got it up and operational. It's an AMD64 3000+ with 1.5GB RAM, and five 7200RPM hard drives (total of 720 gigs) running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE (amd64). When doing testing and initial install/configuration of this machine (compiling apps and such) I didn't notice this too much, but now that I'm actually using it this is starting to be noticeable. The issue I'm having is that every minute or two, I will hear some stuttering in any audio/video playback (will see the video freeze if video), and my mouse will freeze for a few seconds as well while this happens. It seems to happen more frequently if I have something doing disk I/O, such as downloads running, untarring files, or torrents. Right now, I have the following applications open: Xorg Xfce X-Chat Mozilla Firefox (Only about 10 tabs, as opposed to my normal 40-50 tabs) Terminal XMMS Mozilla Thunderbird rtorrent I initially noticed it on this machine when untarring a 20MB tar.bz2 file, and I figured with it untarring that a little audio stuttering would be expected. Then today, I started noticing it when doing normal things. All I'm doing now is just light browsing with XMMS and X-Chat open, and maybe one download going. While my AMD64 was out of commission, I was using an Athlon XP 2000+ with 1GB of RAM and an old slower hard drive. It ran FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE as well. I noticed the same stutters in audio/video playback and freezing of the mouse there, although it was much more frequent. Here is a top output from just now: last pid: 59025; load averages: 0.07, 0.08, 0.12 59 processes: 1 running, 58 sleeping CPU states: 4.3% user, 0.0% nice, 2.3% system, 1.6% interrupt, 91.8% idle Mem: 841M Active, 245M Inact, 194M Wired, 72M Cache, 162M Buf, 2300K Free Swap: 3045M Total, 96K Used, 3045M Free So basically I'm wondering if there are any OS optimizations or anything I am missing to reduce this? I'm not sure why on this type of hardware with not even using half of what I normally would have open (at least Firefox tabs wise) it would cause so many hiccups like this. Thanks in advance for any opinions or suggestions. -Mark
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