expire running dead slow

[Bill Davidsen]

Mark Hittinger wrote:
>>>>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? :-)

Given that I am using only 5% of the CPU, I think I have enough power 
;-) The system is running 50-80% waitio mode, but neight the disk not 
network is particularly busy. And the other identical machines don't do 
this.

I like the idea of swapping best, I'm measuring the swap results on my 
other machines, but they all appear to be doing none, while the problem 
machine is doing a bit. But it's been rebooted, there isn't any obvious 
memory leak WRT the other systems, and I don't have a clue why this one 
is being bad while the other are working fine.

The six machines are xref slaves, so when I say they are the same, they 
are about as "same" as computers get.

-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen at tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me