From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Sep 28 13:09:30 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FE2216A4B3 for ; Sun, 28 Sep 2003 13:09:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rutger.owt.com (rutger.owt.com [204.118.6.16]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8EB3344033 for ; Sun, 28 Sep 2003 13:09:28 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kstewart@owt.com) Received: from topaz-out (owt-207-41-94-233.owt.com [207.41.94.233]) by rutger.owt.com (8.11.6p2/8.9.3) with ESMTP id h8SK9Hw12377; Sun, 28 Sep 2003 13:09:17 -0700 From: Kent Stewart To: "Charles Howse" , Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 13:09:16 -0700 User-Agent: KMail/1.5.4 References: <000001c385f7$f948a5d0$04fea8c0@moe> In-Reply-To: <000001c385f7$f948a5d0$04fea8c0@moe> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200309281309.16986.kstewart@owt.com> Subject: Re: Comparing buildworld times on twin machines X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 20:09:30 -0000 On Sunday 28 September 2003 12:37 pm, Charles Howse wrote: > Hi, > I have 2 machines on my home network with (almost) identical > hardware. They both have Celeron 300, same motherboards, same BIOS, > same options set in BIOS, etc. > Same make.conf, same kernel config. > I kill SETI@home before starting on each machine. > The only difference is that curly has 128 MB ram where larry has only > 64. > > They *do not*, however have identical hard drives, even though each > machine has 2 drives, with /usr/obj on the second drive of each > machine. > > When I buildworld, I use the following command, and write the output > to '$blog'. > > [portion of script omitted, entire script is attached as update1.sh] > > \time -aho $$blog make buildworld > > [snip] > > Larry can buildworld in 1 hr 57 mins. > It takes curly 3 hrs 16 mins, even though curly has twice the ram. > > If I watch the compile, with one eye on the disk activity light, it > seems to me that the process is largely CPU intensive, therefore I > would expect that the buildworld times should be roughly equal. > > 1) How can I determine what might be causing curly to take so long > compared to larry? > > 2) Since curly runs httpd, and vsftpd, is it acceptable to run the > entire build/install process in single-user mode in order to prevent > other processes from eating CPU cycles? > > On my systems, which all run setiathome, I only see a few percent variation in buildworld time with seti running. I start setiathome with a -nice 19 so that it doesn't interfere. You might be able to see some of the processes running using top. You could always stop apache. My setup has /usr/src and /usr/obj on a 2nd and 3rd hd and I log everything to the 1st HD.. All of the HDs are on their own controller and they are ata-133's on the main system. A system with ata-66s is not 50% slower. I kind of wonder if you have cache turned on in the cpu. That much difference is pretty hard to come up with unless your 2 daemons are interfering. You might see that running top. Watch the swap to see if anything is happening. FWIW, I had one system with everything identical but the mobos and one ran 15% slower than the other. I never did figure out what was causing the difference. It is my only 400MHz machine and only use it for some special programs. Kent -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html