Severe performance issues with pkgsrc-2006Q3?

[Hauke Fath <hf%spg.tu-darmstadt.de@localhost>]

Hi,

we have about two dozen lab machines here running with NetBSD 3.1, 
ranging from 700 MHz Athlons over Pentium4 machines to a few AMD 
dual-core boxes. The machines are kept on essentially identical 
software state by Radmind.

A while back, I updated the whole set from pkgsrc-2006Q1 to 
pkgssrc-2006Q3, using pkg_chk(8) and binary packages from a local 
sandboxed bulk build. Besides the usual odd application crashing, the 
loudest complaint from users is about bad performance.

The machines offer KDE, Gnome, XFCE4 and your favourite window 
manager as environment via gdm, but the problem seems to concern all 
of them. As an example, when I log in to XFCE4, first opening of a 
popup menu from xfce4-panel takes 15 sec on an AMD 700 MHz / 384 MB 
RAM. During that time, system load is around 2, there are still > 100 
MB RAM unused, there is disk activity, and xfce4-panel is busy 
consuming cpu time. The next menu then appears instantaneously. 
Similar under Gnome: A Gnome terminal takes around 15 sec to appear, 
a KDE konsole 20 sec, and even an xterm needs 10 sec.

A Debian Sarge test install, OTOH, felt surprisingly snappy on the 
same machine, and notably faster than the NetBSD installation on a 
P4/1600/1Gb RAM.

While that performance thing may just be the proverbial straw which 
breaks the camel's back, i.e. initiates a move to (most likely) 
Debian, I would still like to understand what is happening here. 
Delays are not noticeable on a console prompt, and once applications 
are up and running, they are in usable state. Nothing hangs, the 
machines just seem to be extremely busy with even the slightest UI 
activity... Apart from X11, the one element common to all the 
environments are fonts...

Has anyone seen anything similar with recent pkgsrc? Any ideas what I 
could check for? I find it embarassingly hard to get to the bottom of 
such a global issue, but the last thing I want to do is randomly 
twiddling knobs without a real understanding of what's happening.

Thanks for comments,

        hauke

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