expire running dead slow

[Mark Hittinger]

> >>I have a machine, 1 of 6, running INN 2.4.1 on an Intel platform. CNFS
> >>storage, about 8TB, dual 2.8GHz HT Xeons, 2.5GB memory. Redhat
> >>Enterprise AS3.0.
> >>This is one of our small regional servers. For some reason, expire on
> >>this machine takes forever to do expire every few days, anywhere from
> >>35-50 hours. At other times it runs only 1-2 hours. We have about 22M
> >>articles in history, INN is built largefile enabled, obviously.
> ...

> Other ideas desperately embraced.

Try disabling HT.  I have some applications that will get queued to run
on the "logical" cpu on systems with HT enabled and they will slow way down.

This might explain the 2 hours vs. 35 hours.

Disabling HT will force the expire to run on one of the "real" cpu's.

It is particularly bad if the applications that get queued to the "logical"
cpu own locks.

Since you have dual Xeon's you have to run the smp kernel but I think you
should be able to disable HT in the bios.

BTW have you compiled inn with gcc 3.4.0 -O3?  On number crunching stuff
(particularly floating point) the newer gcc is able to do some better Intel
optimization - but that might be more noticeable on the northwood/prescott
cpu rather than the xeon.  On I/O bound inn who knows? :-)

Later

Mark Hittinger
bugs at pu.net