Last weekend we upgraded our Alpha 2100 from 3.0A to 4.0B
(with the latest patch kit). The system is mainly used
as internet-server (www,news,dns,bootp,pop/imap) and is
thus pretty I/O bound.
After the upgrade we see a decline of general performance.
Especially the use of the commands that do something with
the password file like "mkpasswd" have become almost
unusable. Our password is pretty large but not extreme,
it contains over 13000 accounts. A simple "vipw" command
takes over 10 minutes to complete after leaving the
editor. Since there a many changes in accounts every
day the system is almost unusable at the moment.
The strange thing is that the "mkpasswd" command gets very
little CPU time (max. 4 %) and the system disk has an
average I/O rate of about 800 KB/sec. This behaviour
is introduced wiht version 4.0B of Digital Unix.
I know that performance problems can be pretty complex
but if anyone has a clue i would very much like to
hear about it.
Maurice Steyvers
Universiteit Maastricht.
Received on Fri Dec 05 1997 - 03:23:01 NZDT