RE: [mv] Slow Revisited

["Harry Patterson" <harry@visiontm.com>]

I solved my slowness problem with MiniVend and wanted to share the
resolution(s) for others benefit. There were really 3 things that
dramatically improved performance or were required for MiniVend to operate
in FreeBSD.

1) FreeBSD defaults to Maxusers=10 in the kernel configuration. While the
maximum number of users is in itself not a problem, FreeBSD uses this number
in the Kernel to determine the maximum number of open files allowed. This
was not so much a speed issue as an abort issue. From the book "The Complete
FreeBSD" by Greg Lehey ... "The most important table  by Maxusers is the
maximum number of processes, which can be set to 20+16*Maxusers, so if you
set Maxusers to one, then you have only 36 simultaneous processes including
the 18 or so that the system starts up at boot time". I increased this
number to 200, which might be excessive, but seemed appropriate in order to
run MiniVend and for future expansion and hasn't seemed to affect
performance of other processes. Anyone have a reason to reduce this?

2) Memory - I initially had 64MB installed on my Pentium II 233. I had some
memory lying around that I installed to bring it up to 96MB. This brought
the time to load the index page in the demo from 50 seconds to 20 seconds.
MiniVend was still cranking the swap file so I figured that bringing it to
128 was the solution. Not exactly...see below.

3) FreeBSD prior to 2.2.6 could only detect 64MB of the RAM without a kernel
adjustment. From some notes others wrote to the FreeBSD mailing list it
appears that at times FreeBSD will see more memory than 64MB in certain (not
consistent) situations which I can only assume was why the performance
increased when I brought mine from 64-96MB. By adding the following line to
my kernel, re-compiling and restarting the system and restarting MiniVend,
my performance improved to roughly 2 seconds or similar to the demo at
minivend.com. Problem Solved. The line in the kernel is as follows:

options 	"MAXMEM=131072"

The above number equates to 1024 * the amount of RAM or in my case
128MB=131072.

Since this chewed up multiple hours over several days, I hope someone else
can benefit from my experience.

Harry Patterson


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-minivend-users@minivend.com
> [mailto:owner-minivend-users@minivend.com]On Behalf Of Harry Patterson
> Sent: Saturday, November 13, 1999 6:07 PM
> To: Minivend-users@minivend.com
> Subject: [mv] Slow Revisited
>
>
> ******    message to minivend-users from "Harry Patterson"
> <harry@visiontm.com>     ******
>
> Hi All,
>
> I've read all the pertinent documentation I could find including the FAQ,
> the Reference pages and about 150 messages trying to solve my
> speed problem
> with MiniVend. I've cut the response time on the demo from 50 seconds to
> display the index page down to 20 seconds, but that is still unacceptable
> and not close to the 3-5 seconds the demo takes at minivend.com. The best
> clue I have is that the system seems to be using swap excessively
> even with
> 128 MB, but I can't determine why. There aren't many processes running and
> the hard drive is not working hard except when MiniVend is used during the
> demo. Anyone have any clues as to why or what might be causing
> this and some
> additional steps I can try to reduce this time?
>
> New Install on:
>
> FreeBSD 2.2.5
> Pentium II 233
> 128 MB RAM
> MiniVend 3.14.3
> Perl5
>
> Thanks,
>
> Harry Patterson
>
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