On Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 12:03:05PM -0600, Vijay Sankar wrote: > > if top shows ~20% system load, even when idle, try disabling iic and ichiic > > in UKC. sth we have to do here with an ASUS server. > > Thank you very much for your reply. > > I did not notice the system load to be very high (it was 3.5% or so when > building
Are you sure you saw only 3.5% CPU utilisation while building the OpenBSD base system? That means the CPU was idle almost all of the time. If true, it means the system was spending most of its time waiting for something else before it could continue - probably the disk. Try looking at the output of "iostat -w2" while building. Particularly of interest is the t/s (transfers per second) column. When compiling code, most transfers will be small. A single hard drive spinning at 7200rpm is in theory capable of 240 transfers per second (assuming each transaction requires the platter to rotate on average by half a turn), so values in the range 200-300 are to be expected. If you are seeing much less than this, then maybe your disk subsystem has a problem - a badly setup RAID? No DMA? A faulty drive which is doing retries? A bad IDE cable? (Check for warnings in /var/log/messages) If it looks like disk I/O is slow, then using a disk benchmark program might help you more systematically investigate and tweak. For example, you will find bonnie and bonnie++ in packages. If you post the full output of "dmesg", "mount" and "df -k", plus a description of your disk subsystem, people might have some more suggestions. HTH, Brian.
