poor performance on big machine

[Simon 'corecode' Schubert]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
    Is the machine swapping?  Look at the SWAP PAGER stats with systat -vm 1.
I did not configure a swap partition, if that's sufficient information.  The box has 4GB RAM (which seem not to be completely usable, the kernel writes at bootup something like 512MB above 4GB ignored).

    If it is swapping heavily for long periods of time this is usually an
    indication of not having enough memory for the process load.  DragonFly
    is pretty good at keeping things running even during periods of heavy
    paging loads but something still has to give and it usually winds up
    being the disk efficiency.
No, it is not swapping.  It was the start-of-build period when all build processes initialize their chroots and add pkg_add all necessary packages.  It's nothing big, just something I've noticed a couple of times.  Maybe we just need some sort of I/O scheduler.

cheers
 simon