[RC5] Visible slowdown of compilation on FreeBSD

[Decibel!]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 10:35:05AM +0200, Toomas Aas wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I'm repurposing an old server (dual Xeon 2 GHz), and while it's sitting on 
> my desk and various software (from ports) is being installed on it I'm also 
> running dnetc on it:
> 
> dnetc v2.9015-503-CTR-07090314 for FreeBSD (FreeBSD 7.0-RC1).
> 
> The strange thing, which I haven't noticed with any earlier combo of 
> dnetc/FreeBSD, is that dnetc seems to visibly slow down the ./configure 
> step of various port installs. When I start a ./configure while dnetc is 
> running, the output is being printed at the speed of 1-2 lines per second. 
> As soon as I stop dnetc, the ./configure output starts flowing by at much 
> higher speed.
> 
> This is all of course pretty un-scientific and I'm not trying to say that 
> something is wrong with dnetc, just wanted to share an observation.
> 
> BTW, the kernel is using ULE scheduler.

configure does a lot of process creation; it's very possible that every
time a process is created the kernel will look for something else to run
in the meantime, and d.net is always there and ready to go.

If FBSD had a true idle process level this probably wouldn't be an
issue...
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect            decibel at distributed.net
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

Windows: "Where do you want to go today?"
Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"
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