Fedora Core 3 test 2 performance

[Nifty Hat Mitch]

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 09:19:49AM -0400, Glenn Stauffer wrote:
....
> The drive is an IBM Travelstar 60gb 5400 rpm hard drive.
> 
> I booted into single user mode and did some testing
.....
> So, I guess at 16.97 MB/sec in runlevel 5, I'm seeing about the best I
> can expect from this drive.  At least with more or less standard
> hdparm settings.
....
> So, I'm getting sufficient performance from the drives now, but
> startup still takes about 4 minutes from entering my password.
....
> Puzzling!

Yep puzzling...

Just curious what about readahead_early and readahead
on your system...

    # chkconfig --list | egrep "read|nscd"
    readahead_early 0:off   1:off   2:off   3:off   4:off   5:on    6:off
    readahead       0:off   1:off   2:off   3:off   4:off   5:on    6:off
    nscd            0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

IMO, nscd is always a good idea.

/etc/readahead.files and /etc/readahead.early.files contain
a gazillion files and may be helping or hurting depending on 
your DRAM.  There is about 120MB of bits so boxes with less
than 256MB of DRAM may find the list a bit long.

It is not silly for some folks to look at system 'lsof' listings and
build lists of files that can be used with /usr/sbin/readahead to keep
'important' files cached memory.  Perhaps a cron job.

For me it is things like 'emacs' load time variability that 
made me look at this or keep a copy of emacs up in another
window.

Classic Unixes once used a sticky bit and some other tricks 
to this end.  Pick a select set of files that is 1/3 of DRAM memory 
or less and tinker.

Try your .login.bashrc  might have a small readahead task that
can help the scheduler and IO system do what you need.

I you login, then logout then login quickly a second time
does the time change.

Like I say tinker.

Also the BIGGEST slow down for most people is DNS.
Make sure that DNS host name resolution is quick.
See nscd and inspect /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf,
/etc/host.conf.

Search the archives on how to turn off IPV6, IPV6 DNS lookups 
can be slow as they often time out.

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Me, I would "Rather" Not.