Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:07:42 -0800 From: "Kevin Oberman" <oberman@es.net> To: Mathieu Prevot <freebsd-stable@club-internet.fr> Cc: amd64@freebsd.org, stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 6.1 responsiveness under heavy (cpu?) load + thread monitoring Message-ID: <20060401210742.6729C45083@ptavv.es.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 01 Apr 2006 16:34:25 %2B0200." <20060401143425.GA1305@scienceclue.ath.cx>
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> Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2006 16:34:25 +0200 > From: Mathieu Prevot <freebsd-stable@club-internet.fr> > Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org > > Hello, > > I have a RELENG_6/AMD64 with an AMD64X2 cpu, 1GB of memory, 512MB swap. > I remarked that when I run 2 simulation program [1], sometimes, one of them > run one or several of its threads [2] very slowly, but sometimes, it doesn't > occur. > > I remarked that is doesn't depend on SMP/UP, ULE/4BSD, i386/AMD64. > > It seems to occur also with the kernel stress test under the same conditions > (all of them). > In this case, the mouse is blocked, etc. I tested different kernels, and > recorded the output of sysctl vm [3]. > > I increased vm.swap_async_max but this doesn't change the deal /a priori/. > > All that didn't occur with a Sempron64. All was slower but the mouse didn't > blocked etc. This was a time ago, I may be wrong. > > It seems to be an architecture problem (??). > I can give more quantitative data, but I need help to focus the tests... > > Mathieu > > [1] http://ising.podzone.org/src/ising_lps_0.4.tar.bz2 > [2] void *interface(void *arg) can be very slow, void *system_trace(void *arg) > can exit during a very long time (terminated ? detached: it should). > [3] http://ising.podzone.org/vm/vm_amd64.tar.bz2 and others in this directory Mathieu, Any chance your system was running tight on memory? How much does it have and is the system using any swap space? I suspect that something is not working well in V5 or V6 with writing to/reading from swap. I have reported a similar problem and Kris K. asked me to try adjusting vm.swap_async_max, but the system has been replaced and I ave been having trouble getting a systems set up to test. (Disk died.) I hope to try Kris's suggestion next week, but your report makes this seem less likely. I can say that I don't see this on my new system which increased memory from 256MB to 1GB. Needless to say, it seldom has to use the swap file and I must agree that it seems tied to threaded processes. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634
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