Scoop Does Not Scale

For the last year Kuro5hin has been experiencing database corruption, timeouts, downtime, and packet loss of a frequency and volume both detrimental to site usage and inexplicable by any means. Now, after 12 months of unacceptable instability—especially in light of the $35,000 donated to Rusty to run Kuro5hin—I am moved to examine the outages and poor performance that have been plaguing this site. It is my responsibility to the average Kuro5hin user to expose the culprit.

Pentium Pro-blems Redux

I took some of the suggestions from my last thread to heart and modified my system's RAM, video card, and operating system. After a grand total of $700 and the last week of my time she's fighting a little harder than last round. The current specs are as follows:

• 2x Pentium Pro 266 MHz/1 MB L2
• 66 MHz bus
• 1,024 MB 5v 60ns non-ECC EDO RAM
• 100 GB 7200 RPM EIDE hard drive
• ATi Radeon 9200 Pro PCI
• FreeBSD 5.1

The FreeBSD 5.1 kernel was compiled with support for both of my CPUs and optimizations for the Pro specifically and its cache. I am running KDE 3.1 and can't complain about the speed at all — it's much greater than Windows XP ever was. I have been in touch with a FreeBSD hacker who ensured my decision to move to this operating system instead of Linux was the way to go. The SMP and virtual memory subsystems in the FreeBSD kernel are much more efficient than either Windows or Linux. FreeBSD cost me nothing to install and only took a little time to compile the proper kernel.

The four 256 MB chips cost $410 after tax and shipping/handling. Considering the RAM alone, performance is not what I would call a 2x increase over the 512 MB, but overall it did augment my system. The output below from a FreeBSD utility called top illustrates this. One thing I want to try is ECC RAM. It's 72-bit vs. non-ECC RAM which is 64-bit, and I think that switching my gigabyte of non-ECC RAM for ECC chips will give me more memory bandwidth and ergo the performance I was expecting in installing another 512 MB.

Processes: 48 total, 4 running, 44 sleeping... 126 threads Load Avg: 2.26, 1.69, 1.30 CPU usage: 43.2% user, 56.8% sys, 0.0% idle SharedLibs: num = 117, resident = 52.8M code, 2.45M data, 7.87M LinkEdit MemRegions: num = 5359, resident = 109M + 9.91M private, 84.0M shared PhysMem: 260M wired, 390M active, 287M inactive, 937M used, 87M free VM: 2.38G + 82.5M 71607(0) pageins, 5190(0) pageouts

Redraws are faster and I now have a vast array of bit-depths and monitor resolutions with my new Radeon 9200. I also went out and bought a 21" CRT monitor so I could enjoy a larger desktop without going blind. Though the 9200 has done little to affect overall system performance, I appreciate what it does for my graphics. In the very least any games for FreeBSD will fly 4x faster than before: The 9200 has 128 MB RAM where my Rage only had 32 MB. I'm happy with this addition to my system especially since I got a $20 rebate off of the $200 I paid for it.

Aside from these tweaks my system remains the same. I can not boost the bus clock above 66 MHz. My 100 GB hard drive, due to BIOS limitations, is partitioned into several 16 GB slices. (I wonder if anyone knows of any BIOS hacks to overcome this limitation.) I believe I may finally be pushing the limits of my system's hardware and am looking at ways to optimize my operating system. Supposedly FreeBSD 5.2 is in beta now, and I've heard good things about something called QNX. Here's to any more suggestions to eek all of the power out of my dual Pentium Pro system.

Pentium Pro-blems

Hi, I have a pet project most of you will find interesting, and I've run into a block that some of you can help me with. First, here's the specs on my system:

• Two Pentium Pro, 200 MHz/1 MB cache oc'ed to 266 MHz
• 512 MB 5v 168-pin 60ns EDO RAM
• 100 GB 7200 RPM IDE hard drive
• 32 MB ATi Radeon PCI video card
• Windows XP Pro Service Pack 1

I get about the same performance as I would with dual 300 MHz Pentium II chips if you disregard the bus speed differences, and I have been very happy with this system so far. One thing I would like to do, however, that I think will improve system performance is to upgrade to 1 GB RAM. I notice some serious redraw problems and a lot of swapping going on, and my CPU use is always at at least 15%, and simple tasks like moving windows and editing HTML spike it to 70%. Real intensive stuff drives the CPUs to 100% max for longer than I feel it should. Kernel time is a significant proportion of this.

The IBM docs on this machine say it can be upgraded only to 512 MB, using 128 MB chips, but I have found RAM that matches the physical and eletrical specs to a T save for that they are 256 MB chips.

Does anyone have any experience with this? The motherboard is from an IBM PC 365.

Thank you.

Power Mac G5³

Recently, many in the Mac community have been discussing the possibility of a G5-based Cube design, similar to Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube. I don't think this will happen, as the thing that killed the original G4 Cube, and that would damn the G5 cube to the same fate eventually, is the lack of market for the thing. Yes, I would like to have one, but being a Mac geek is not a characteristic most Mac users share. Let me explain the lack of market for the Cube and why it's destined to fail.

Mojopocalypse Now

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Welcome to the Machine

Hello. I would like to discuss a neat little command line utility included in Mac OS X that doesn't get enough attention in my humble opinion. Living in /usr/bin/, this simple Open Source tool is something that I just can not live without. What is this wondrous textual utility that I'm talking about? It's none other than machine!

Included since 1991 with the 4.4BSD platform, machine gives you the processor name that your system is based on. I don't know if it works for Intel or any other architectures since when I opened up the binary in TextEdit.app and couldn't find any processor name strings. Here's an incomplete list of machine output that I do know of to help illustrate what I mean:

• ppc603
• ppc604
• ppc620
• ppc750
• ppc970

The cleverest aspect of machine is bringing up its manual page. I wonder who was clever enough to invent this little pun, but it makes me LOL every time I do it. Sometimes I do it just to laugh, even if I don't want to learn about machine at the moment. In case you can't guess, here is the command to bring up the manual:

man machine

omfg rorlolf

I have been accessing this program since OpenStep 4.2, then in Rhapsody DR2 and continue to use it today under Mac OS X v10.3. Kudos to NeXT and now Apple for including this Wunderwerkzeug for almost 10 years. It sure makes my Power Mac a joy to use. Check it out!