BSD is low-performance than XP! HOWTO Improve ?

fronclynne · Mar 28, 2010

Sorry, that joke was in kind of poor taste.

One quick check you can make is [cmd=""]vmstat -i[/cmd]. An interrupt storm can slow a machine down a lot. Note, though, that it probably is not this.

volatilevoid · Mar 28, 2010

An interrupt storm is also most likely logged to /var/log/messages so looking there might help as well.

FreeJX · Mar 28, 2010

Zare said:
FreeJX, disable hald and dbus, and add

Code:

Option AllowEmptyInput "Off"

in ServerLayout section of xorg.conf. HAL and D-BUS really make my laptop sluggish, they seem to query hardware way too often and eat 10% of CPU easily. By the way, you don't really need them for X if that's desktop computer.

Also, while your XFCE is up, switch to another virtual console (Alt+F2, for instance), login, run top and post the output.

Otherwise, your config seems OK.

Any more information for this ?

Code:

Option    AllowEmptyInput   "Off"

@Zare, are you suggesting to added the following entries in /etc/rc.conf?

Code:

moused_nondefault_enable="NO"
moused_enable="NO"

FreeJX · Mar 28, 2010

@fronclynne

Could you tell me whether it is normal ? I've no idea for this.

Code:

# vmstat -i
interrupt                          total       rate
irq6: fdc0                             6          0
irq14: ata0                        56615          6
irq15: ata1                        65503          7
irq16: uhci0+                     160383         19
irq18: uhci2+                      58029          7
irq19: uhci1                        3554          0
irq20: bge0                         7362          0
irq23: ehci0                           3          0
cpu0: timer                     16438613       1999
cpu1: timer                     16438575       1999
Total                           33228643       4042

jailed · Mar 28, 2010

FreeJX said:
@fronclynne
Could you tell me whether it is normal ? I've no idea for this.

Normal.

Code:

tail -n 50 /var/log/messages

You should see a message like "interrupt storm at irq xx ..."

However, your vmstat is ok.

Zare · Mar 28, 2010

Any more information for this ?

Yes. hald is a daemon which supplies information about hardware events (device plug in/out, etc...). D-BUS is an interprocess communication daemon that allows various programs to "talk" to eachother. Therefore, xorg relies on hald and it's "courier" dbus to get information about your peripheral hardware. That way, you don't need to explicitly specify your keyboard / mouse model and protocol in xorg.conf. xorg will autodetect it via hald.

However, HAL daemon can sometimes slow the system down, and i had that case on my laptop.

So, to turn off both of them, first shutdown your X server (ctrl + alt + backspace).
Stop hald and dbus;

Code:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/hald stop
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/dbus stop

...then edit /etc/rc.conf and comment appropriate lines;

Code:

#hald_enable="YES"
#dbus_enable="YES"

Then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add

Code:

Option   AllowEmptyInput   "Off"

into ServerLayout section of xorg.conf; that's anywhere between Section "ServerLayout" and the nearest EndSection tag.

AllowEmptyInput is turned on by default, hence the xorg won't auto add standard keyboard and mouse drivers, but will rely on hald/dbus instead. When you turn those daemons down, you need xorg to auto-add standard input drivers, or else you won't have keyboard or mouse control.

wblock@ · Apr 4, 2010

Zare said:
Then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add

Code:

Option AllowEmptyInput "Off"

into ServerLayout section of xorg.conf; that's anywhere between Section "ServerLayout" and the nearest EndSection tag.

AllowEmptyInput is turned on by default, hence the xorg won't auto add standard keyboard and mouse drivers, but will rely on hald/dbus instead. When you turn those daemons down, you need xorg to auto-add standard input drivers, or else you won't have keyboard or mouse control.

Please, stop recommending this. AEI is the *wrong* way to disable HAL with xorg, and frequently causes problems like slow input or no input until mouse movement. The right way is to use

Code:

Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"

as shown in the Handbook. The next time you see someone recommending AEI, please correct them. It popped up as a fix to a temporary bug a year ago and is still causing problems.

Zare · Apr 4, 2010

Ok, i stand corrected. Didn't know that was going on.

aragon · Apr 4, 2010

FWIW, I find it more effective to simply recompile the Xserver port with HAL support disabled. No need to even run the daemon then, let alone worrying about configuring anything to ignore it.

This doesn't prevent your X window manager or apps from using HAL if you still need that.

wblock@ · Apr 5, 2010

In xfce, I've found window closing delays to usually be a video driver problem, sometimes just exceeding what the Intel built-in video can do. Here's the driver section from a netbook:

Code:

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Card0"
        Driver     "intel"
        BusID      "PCI:0:2:0"
        Option     "AccelMethod" "UXA"
        Option     "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
        Option     "CacheLines" "1980"
EndSection

This 845 chipset is slow when compositing is enabled in xfce, so that's disabled. Go to Settings/Window Manager Tweaks/Compositor window and uncheck "Enable display compositing".

zeiz · Apr 5, 2010

rossiya said:
Although if you're comfortable tweaking your own kernel and rebuilding your system with the 'pentium4' CFLAG you'd get more speed.

I'm comfortable

How (precisely) to tweak?

BTW I have "ancient" (~ 8 y.o.) machine with P4 2.4GHz @768MB of ram and FreeBSD's performance wasn't worse than XP. After ram upgrade to 2.5GB FreeBSD runs just excellent while XP seems doesn't benefit. My Firefox runs better on FreeBSD than on XP.