Apologies for posting a tuning question on a non-vanilla kernel -
I'll switch to a recent 2.6 vanilla kernel next chance I get.
But just in case this situation sounds familliar to anyone:
I have a zippy little 2GHz Athlon XP with 512 MB RAM running
2.4.20 (as supplied by Red Hat 9) which
normally builds gcc/glibc toolchains very quickly. However,
when I wrote a script to build 200 different combinations of gcc / glibc / target
one after the other, deleting each one immediately after installing it,
performance mysteriously drops after about the 40th iteration;
the CPU is mostly idle, and the system is swapping like crazy.
It's turning a several day job into a several week job :-(
I see someone else reported a similar problem (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=118397),
and said adjusting a proc setting helped, but they didn't say which one :-(
Any suggestions on tuning the existing kernel before I pitch it?
I'll append the contents of /proc/meminfo etc below.
Thanks!
- Dan
$ uname -a
Linux fast 2.4.20-6 #1 Thu Feb 27 10:01:19 EST 2003 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513852 507464 6388 0 1456 6012
-/+ buffers/cache: 499996 13856
Swap: 1052248 16276 1035972
$ cat meminfo
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 526184448 515788800 10395648 0 1277952 8548352
Swap: 1077501952 17084416 1060417536
MemTotal: 513852 kB
MemFree: 10152 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 1248 kB
Cached: 5532 kB
SwapCached: 2816 kB
Active: 972 kB
ActiveAnon: 312 kB
ActiveCache: 660 kB
Inact_dirty: 3944 kB
Inact_laundry: 0 kB
Inact_clean: 4816 kB
Inact_target: 1944 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 513852 kB
LowFree: 10152 kB
SwapTotal: 1052248 kB
SwapFree: 1035564 kB
$ vmstat 5
procs memory swap io system cpu
r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id
0 3 2 52456 6304 876 2080 1 2 9 8 3 4 3 2 2
0 1 2 52596 6304 824 524 12519 118 12806 129 575 1026 0 3 97
1 0 2 52596 6396 836 560 10437 74 10864 77 517 921 0 2 98
0 1 2 52596 6308 804 644 10522 72 10996 75 519 919 0 2 98
$ ps augxw | egrep 'dank|kswapd|bdflush'
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 9 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW May09 0:27 [bdflush]
root 5 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? DW May09 18:57 [kswapd]
dank 21494 0.0 0.0 4144 0 pts/1 SW 14:55 0:00 sh /home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/crosstool.sh
dank 20973 0.0 0.0 3572 0 pts/1 SW 17:54 0:00 make LD=arm-softfloat-linux-gnu-ld RANLIB=arm-softfloat-linux-gnu-ranlib
dank 20974 0.0 0.0 5920 0 pts/1 SW 17:54 0:03 make -r PARALLELMFLAGS= CVSOPTS= -C /home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/build/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/gcc-3.3.3-glibc-2.3.2/gl
ibc-2.3.2 objdir=/home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/build/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/gcc-3.3.3-glibc-2.3.2/build-glibc all
dank 27105 0.9 0.2 46920 1228 pts/1 D 17:58 1:03 make -C iconvdata subdir_lib
... wait a second just to see what's running besides make ...
$ ps augxw | egrep 'dank'
dank 21494 0.0 0.0 4144 0 pts/1 SW 14:55 0:00 sh /home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/crosstool.sh
dank 20973 0.0 0.0 3572 0 pts/1 SW 17:54 0:00 make LD=arm-softfloat-linux-gnu-ld RANLIB=arm-softfloat-linux-gnu-ranlib
dank 20974 0.0 0.0 5920 0 pts/1 SW 17:54 0:03 make -r PARALLELMFLAGS= CVSOPTS= -C /home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/build/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/gcc-3.3.3-glibc-2.3.2/glibc-2.3.2
objdir=/home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/build/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/gcc-3.3.3-glibc-2.3.2/build-glibc all
dank 29787 3.3 0.1 5100 528 pts/1 S 19:56 0:00 make -C locale subdir_lib
dank 30180 1.0 0.0 4168 412 pts/1 S 19:57 0:00 /bin/sh -c arm-softfloat-linux-gnu-gcc -M -MP C-ctype.c -std=gnu99 -O -Wall -Winline -Wstrict-prototypes -Wwrite-strings -DLOCALE_PATH='"/usr/lib/locale:/usr/share/i18n"'
-DLOCALEDIR='"/usr/lib/locale"' -DLOCALE_ALIAS_PATH='"/usr/share/locale"' -DCHARM
dank 30181 0.0 0.0 1448 140 pts/1 S 19:57 0:00 arm-softfloat-linux-gnu-gcc -M -MP C-ctype.c -std=gnu99 -O -Wall -Winline -Wstrict-prototypes -Wwrite-strings -DLOCALE_PATH="/usr/lib/locale:/usr/share/i18n"
-DLOCALEDIR="/usr/lib/locale" -DLOCALE_ALIAS_PATH="/usr/share/locale" -DCHARMAP_PATH="/usr/share/i1
dank 30182 5.0 0.3 5308 1676 pts/1 D 19:57 0:00 /opt/crosstool/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/gcc-3.3.3-glibc-2.3.2/lib/gcc-lib/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/3.3.3/cc1 -E -quiet -nostdinc -Iprograms -I../include -I.
-I/home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/build/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/gcc-3.3.3-glibc-2.3.2/build-glibc/lo
dank 30183 0.0 0.0 3560 148 pts/1 S 19:57 0:00 sed -e s,C-ctype\.o,/home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/build/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/gcc-3.3.3-glibc-2.3.2/build-glibc/locale/C-ctype.o
/home/dank/wk/crosstool-0.28-rc26/build/arm-softfloat-linux-gnu/gcc-3.3.3-glibc-2.3.2/build-glibc/locale/C-ctype.os /home/
--
My technical stuff: http://kegel.com
My politics: see http://www.misleader.org for examples of why I'm for regime change
On Sunday 27 June 2004 05:27, Dan Kegel wrote:
Hi Dan,
> I have a zippy little 2GHz Athlon XP with 512 MB RAM running
> 2.4.20 (as supplied by Red Hat 9) which
> normally builds gcc/glibc toolchains very quickly. However,
> when I wrote a script to build 200 different combinations of gcc / glibc /
> target one after the other, deleting each one immediately after installing
> it, performance mysteriously drops after about the 40th iteration;
> the CPU is mostly idle, and the system is swapping like crazy.
> It's turning a several day job into a several week job :-(
> I see someone else reported a similar problem
> (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=118397), and said
> adjusting a proc setting helped, but they didn't say which one :-(
echo 30 >/proc/sys/vm/inactive_clean_percent
echo 1 10 10 >/proc/sys/vm/pagecache
> Any suggestions on tuning the existing kernel before I pitch it?
use a non-RH kernel.
ciao, Marc
Hi Dan & Marc,
There was a memory leak in do_fork() which was fixed in 2.4.26-pre-something.
Maybe you can hit it with 200 kernel compiles ! I agree with Marc that you
should try with a non-rh kernel, and more specifically a *recent* kernel.
2.4.20 is quite old, even if there were additional security fixes added to
it. 2.4.27-rc2 is out and doing well, you might want to give it a try ?
Regards,
Willy
On Sun, 27 Jun 2004, Marc-Christian Petersen wrote:
> On Sunday 27 June 2004 05:27, Dan Kegel wrote:
>
> > Any suggestions on tuning the existing kernel before I pitch it?
>
> use a non-RH kernel.
Or a Fedora Legacy kernel. The RHL9 product hasn't been
supported by Red Hat since april, currently the Fedora
Legacy people are taking care of the older distributions.
http://www.fedoralegacy.org/
--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan