On Friday 19 January 2007 06:07, Brian Candler wrote: > 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
Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I will try to use the disk benchmarking program bonnie you mentioned. I followed Stuart Henderson's advice and updated the BIOS. That has resolved this problem. The other suggestions that were made and the explanations also helped me a lot (now I know a little bit more about what is iic and ichiic and vmstat!), especially in pointing out where I should look. > > 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. > > !DSPAM:1,45b0b49a17315683411216! -- Vijay Sankar ForeTell Technologies Limited 59 Flamingo Avenue, Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3J 0X6 Phone: +1 (204) 885-9535, E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
