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Jaglover
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 Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 2:25 pm Post subject: Crappy hardware? |
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Installing Gentoo on a Celeron 500 MHz. Despite using distcc it is still incredibly slow. Looking at top output I noticed kernel consumes up to 70% of CPU resources. Doing all the magic with hdparm did not help much. Anybody has an idea or hint how to decrease system overhead?
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 6:30 pm Post subject: |
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Jaglover,
What does hdparm /dev/.... for your hard drive show?
Using DMA (0) is ABadThing but it can be fixed by rebuilding your kernel
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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Jaglover
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Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 6:47 pm Post subject: |
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I'm doing a stage 3 install, built my own kernel in process and got everything right, I guess. At least DMA was on from first boot. I even added "/sbin/hdparm -c3 -u1 -m16 /dev/hda" to local.start to make my HDD tweaks stick.
| Code: | netbox ~ # hdparm /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 3 (32-bit w/sync)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 26354/16/63, sectors = 26564832, start = 0
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 6:55 pm Post subject: |
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Jaglover,
Hmm. looks mostly harmless. Even with distcc your celery still does the configure nd link steps, that can be I/O intensive.
Do you allow it to run compiles too or is it set to no jobs in your distcc set up ?
can be a bad thing. It was a dirty hack in the days before Serial Port UARTs had FIFOs to get the speed over 9600 baud without dropped characters. What it does is to unmask lower priority IRQs during the relatively long disk IRQ routine. Servicing these unmasked IRQs extends the time taken to run the disk IRQ, slowing down disc access a little.
Depending on how your IRQs are allocated, you may or may not get a lot of unmasked IRQs.
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NeddySeagoon
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Jaglover
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Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 7:07 pm Post subject: |
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The localhost is not included in distcc hosts. Perhaps it is the cheapo 3com NIC. But then again, max sys usage occurs during configure and linking when there is no network activity. I suspect there is something wrong with that motherboard, it cannot save/remember BIOS settings BTW despite the battery is OK.
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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Jaglover,
You can make a chroot on another host and build your celery install there with FEATURES="buildpkg" then use emerge -K ... to install the binary packages on the celery
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NeddySeagoon
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Jaglover
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widan
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Joined: 07 Jun 2005
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Location: Paris, France
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 8:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Jaglover wrote: | | But then again, max sys usage occurs during configure and linking when there is no network activity. |
Configure steps are executed one after the other, not in parallel, so there is nothing to distribute (and offloading those compiles could be worse - they are small, and the latencies of setting up the remote compilation could very well make it slower than just doing them locally). Linking can't be offloaded to another machine as you need access to the (local) libraries.
| Jaglover wrote: | | I suspect there is something wrong with that motherboard, it cannot save/remember BIOS settings BTW despite the battery is OK. |
Are you sure the battery is good ? A machine that loses its BIOS settings is a machine with a dead battery, or one stuck in "clear CMOS" mode (check the jumper). |
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Jaglover
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Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 9:04 pm Post subject: |
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Uh, the battery thing is double-checked. Years ago lightning struck the phone line and fried the PCI modem in one of my computers. I bought a new PC then. Now my neighbors 486 ! running Win 3.0 !!! died and I thought I'll build a better one for old man who can't afford to buy a new computer. I think this may be the same m/b... I'll give it away for free of course, do not want to invest anything in it - except my work.
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Kernel & Hardware
