Subject: Re: LFS performance and kern.maxvnodes
To: Blair Sadewitz <blair.sadewitz@gmail.com>
From: Allen Briggs <briggs@netbsd.org>
List: tech-perform
Date: 09/10/2007 22:06:40
On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 09:54:35PM -0400, Blair Sadewitz wrote:
> On 9/10/07, Simon Burge <simonb@netbsd.org> wrote:
> >On 512MB RAM machines I tend to use 128k as a
> > minimum as well.
> On my desktop system with 1GB RAM, 262144 seems to yield the best
> results for me (I've mainly used untarring pkgsrc as a test thusfar).

I have found that if I crank it too high, my system hangs (amd64).
I don't think it's out of memory, but I haven't had a chance to
track it down--I just backed it down to 262144 (trying with 524288
at the moment, though).  I think I had it at 2097152 when it wedged
last (the machine has 6GB of RAM running GENERIC.MP from 30 Aug 07).

> Another thing I was going to propose was setting sysctl.conf defaults
> from sysinst using basic heuristics, taking into account [at least]
> the amount of system memory and anticipated workload.
> We could then use this information to help suggest more intelligent
> defaults for things such as base filesystem layout and bsize/fsize,
> etc.

This sounds to me like a good start.

-allen

-- 
Allen Briggs  |  http://www.ninthwonder.com/~briggs/  |  briggs@ninthwonder.com