Hello guys, I have an amd64 server with 8 cpu cores and 16Gb of memory, with FreeBSD 7.2. It is used as a corporate CVS server with several huge repositories (about 2Gb each), which consist of thousands of rather small files. I need to tune the system so that it caches as much files as possible and minimizes physical access to the disk. Of course, I did enable softupdates, but I have an impression that more things can be tuned.
Specifically, I have read in many places that FreeBSD uses all available memory for disk cache, because disk buffers are integrated with vm pager. However, when I do cvs checkout to the same disk where the repository resides and watch memory usage (by top or systat), repeating that several times to activate the cache, I notice that for 2Gb repository system hardly uses more than 1Gb of memory (including inactive) even after 3-4 checkouts of the same repository, and disk is still used a lot. Why this happens ? How can I tell the system to use as much memory for caching as possible ? I also notice that the buffer cache expires pretty fast: the first checkout takes 2 minutes, if I do checkout again immediately, it takes 1.5 minutes, but if I do it again after waiting a minute, it takes 2 minutes again, even though the machine was completely inactive while I was waiting. Why the cache expires at all when there is a lot of free memory ? Can I somehow tell the system to keep everything cached until something is modified or some process needs memory ? Thank you in advance, please Cc: me as I'm not on this list. If there is more appropriate list for my questions, please point me to one. Regards, Eugene _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
