On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 09:19:49AM -0400, Glenn Stauffer wrote:
....
> The drive is an IBM Travelstar 60gb 5400 rpm hard drive.
>
> I booted into single user mode and did some testing
.....
> So, I guess at 16.97 MB/sec in runlevel 5, I'm seeing about the best I
> can expect from this drive. At least with more or less standard
> hdparm settings.
....
> So, I'm getting sufficient performance from the drives now, but
> startup still takes about 4 minutes from entering my password.
....
> Puzzling!
Yep puzzling...
Just curious what about readahead_early and readahead
on your system...
# chkconfig --list | egrep "read|nscd"
readahead_early 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off
readahead 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off
nscd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
IMO, nscd is always a good idea.
/etc/readahead.files and /etc/readahead.early.files contain
a gazillion files and may be helping or hurting depending on
your DRAM. There is about 120MB of bits so boxes with less
than 256MB of DRAM may find the list a bit long.
It is not silly for some folks to look at system 'lsof' listings and
build lists of files that can be used with /usr/sbin/readahead to keep
'important' files cached memory. Perhaps a cron job.
For me it is things like 'emacs' load time variability that
made me look at this or keep a copy of emacs up in another
window.
Classic Unixes once used a sticky bit and some other tricks
to this end. Pick a select set of files that is 1/3 of DRAM memory
or less and tinker.
Try your .login.bashrc might have a small readahead task that
can help the scheduler and IO system do what you need.
I you login, then logout then login quickly a second time
does the time change.
Like I say tinker.
Also the BIGGEST slow down for most people is DNS.
Make sure that DNS host name resolution is quick.
See nscd and inspect /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf,
/etc/host.conf.
Search the archives on how to turn off IPV6, IPV6 DNS lookups
can be slow as they often time out.
--
T o m M i t c h e l l
Me, I would "Rather" Not.
