Performance problems.

[Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost>]

I've been running the 8650 for a few days now, testing things, building, 
and fooling around.

As far as I can tell, something have seriously deteriorated in the 
kernel, and I suspect it's not the VAX specific bits, but as usual, it 
shows on the VAX.

The first thing I noticied was that a cvs update took way longer than it 
used to. A cvs update of /usr/src now takes me about 130 cpu minutes. It 
used to take maybe a fourth of that.
So I started looking around, but I cannot easily find what is eating all 
that time. I do notice that the cpu spends an abnormal amount of time in 
system state.

While I became suspicious, it wasn't until today that I found another 
data point that makes me suspect something is seriously not done the 
right way now.
I'm loosing a lot of clock interrupts! This should not be possible from 
normal usage of the system. But right now, with a few cvs updates going 
on, as well as a build of the world, I'm looking about 10 seconds on the 
clock, in about 10 minutes. It is bad enough that ntp is not able to sync.

Anyone else seen this, knows what could be affecting it, or care?
Or are all others just using modern fast machines, where all this don't 
really make a blip on the radar anyway, or else is not using their 
machines enough to make this visible?

I'd say something is seriously wrong in the kernel now, and noone is 
forcing the core to keep honest. :-)

Give me a little more time, and I'll be happy to set up NetBSD 2, or 
something similar, and run comparable things to tell how much slower 
things have gotten. I suspect it will show on system calls and file 
operations...

        Johnny