"emerge search", and updatedb performance -- AMD v

[bprompter]

HI, guys...this is sort of a broad/odd question.

I've two amd/ata/asus machines and two p4/ata/supermicro machines. They all have 1GB of ram. They all also use the same hdparm settings which report very good disk performance.

The problem is that on the intel-based machines operations like "emerge search" and "updatedb" are much much faster than on the amd-based boxes. Those operations bring my amd machines to their knees while the intel machines breeze right through them.

Any ideas why the might be? The supermicro (1u servers) have been great, but I don't see why they should be that much faster. The FSB and cpu clock speeds are similar: P4 2.4GHz vs. Athlon XP 3000+.

One other note: the supermicro/Intel machines behaved similarly well with both RH 7.3 and Gentoo.

Thanks for any ideas you might have.

bp

[justanothergentoofanatic]

Those are both very disk-intensive operations. What does hdparm -tT give for each machine?

-Mike

[djh-world]

Go to this post

Scroll to the bottom titled the section "Useful scripts" and download portagedb, it's a lot faster then esearch.
_________________
djh-solutions :: freelance web design | solution provider

[bprompter]

Thanks for both posts above. Here's the hdparm output:
asus/ata/amd:
/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 836 MB in 2.09 seconds = 400.44 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 128 MB in 3.01 seconds = 42.59 MB/sec

supermicro/ata/p4:
/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.34 seconds =376.47 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.58 seconds = 40.51 MB/sec

Also, portagedb looks very interesting...I'm going to give a run. Of course, the asus machines still won't be running like they should

[xororand]