Hi everyone,
Slowly but steadily, the number of boxes I own with FreeBSD installed on them is going up
I have an HP Mini 110-1020LA with FreeBSD that I've been using for a home server for about a year or so. Recently, I bought a Fit-PC2i as a fanless, more portable replacement. Strangely enough though, performance on the new box has been much worse, which is especially surprising considering they have very similar specs, with the HP even being slightly worse. I've been using the compile times the latest version of tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com) as a sort of impromptu benchmark. The time results are here, and they are consistent across runs:
Fit-PC: make 105.39s user 13.45s system 99% cpu 1:59.34 total
HP: make 55.95s user 5.76s system 99% cpu 1:01.93 total
As you can see, the Fit-PC takes about twice as long to compile the same thing. Kind of annoying. The system is also markedly slower just launching things like vim.
The only significant differences between the systems are that the Fit-PC has twice as much RAM (2G vs 1G), a much faster CPU (2GHZ vs 1.6GHZ), and is running ZFS as the root filesystem.
In an effort to control for possible effect of ZFS on root, I booted the Fit-PC with the livecd, fetched the tarsnap tarball into tmp, and built there, the time was almost exactly the same. I also tried with swap off (on zfs on the Fit-PC), with swap back on but without checksumming, and with copies=1 on the FitPC, just for paranoia's sake, but no dice.
Here are some details about the systems:
(I include the cpu frequencies because I actually had an issue with the FitPC being stuck at less than its maximum. Enabling powerd fixed that, but had a minimal impact on the compile. It was actually a bit worse before enabling powerd.)
Are there any issues that I might not have thought of that would account for the difference? Things like bios settings, weird hardware differences, ZFS tunables, driver versions, etc.
Thanks for reading, and any help is greatly appreciated!
Best,
Casey
Slowly but steadily, the number of boxes I own with FreeBSD installed on them is going up
I have an HP Mini 110-1020LA with FreeBSD that I've been using for a home server for about a year or so. Recently, I bought a Fit-PC2i as a fanless, more portable replacement. Strangely enough though, performance on the new box has been much worse, which is especially surprising considering they have very similar specs, with the HP even being slightly worse. I've been using the compile times the latest version of tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com) as a sort of impromptu benchmark. The time results are here, and they are consistent across runs:
Fit-PC: make 105.39s user 13.45s system 99% cpu 1:59.34 total
HP: make 55.95s user 5.76s system 99% cpu 1:01.93 total
As you can see, the Fit-PC takes about twice as long to compile the same thing. Kind of annoying. The system is also markedly slower just launching things like vim.
The only significant differences between the systems are that the Fit-PC has twice as much RAM (2G vs 1G), a much faster CPU (2GHZ vs 1.6GHZ), and is running ZFS as the root filesystem.
In an effort to control for possible effect of ZFS on root, I booted the Fit-PC with the livecd, fetched the tarsnap tarball into tmp, and built there, the time was almost exactly the same. I also tried with swap off (on zfs on the Fit-PC), with swap back on but without checksumming, and with copies=1 on the FitPC, just for paranoia's sake, but no dice.
Here are some details about the systems:
Code:
Both:
running FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE-p3
intel atom CPUs, very similar specs, 32bit, 533mhz memory
hosting a zfs filesystem (root on the Fit-PC)
show < 2-3% cpu load on top while idle
Code:
-= HP Mini 110-1020LA =-
# cpu frequency via sysctl dev.cpu
dev.cpu.0.freq: 1600 (maximum)
# Memory statistics from top:
Mem: 53M Active, 540M Inact, 255M Wired, 20M Cache, 110M Buf, 112M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free
# transfer rate of sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zero count=1000 bs=1m
63 megabytes/s
Code:
-= Fit-PC2i =-
# cpu frequency via sysctl dev.cpu
dev.cpu.0.freq: 1995 (maximum)
# Memory statistics from top:
Mem: 24M Active, 3540K Inact, 73M Wired, 792K Cache, 1880M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free
# transfer rate of sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zero count=1000 bs=1m
54 megabytes/s(I include the cpu frequencies because I actually had an issue with the FitPC being stuck at less than its maximum. Enabling powerd fixed that, but had a minimal impact on the compile. It was actually a bit worse before enabling powerd.)
Are there any issues that I might not have thought of that would account for the difference? Things like bios settings, weird hardware differences, ZFS tunables, driver versions, etc.
Thanks for reading, and any help is greatly appreciated!
Best,
Casey
