Contents
This is very much a work in progress. Please join in and improve it.
Please don't include references to other wiki pages - this will become a new *man* page
This page is the in the process of being converted to a man page with some of the changes here. Please don't modify it at this time until it is committed. At that point I will uncomment the text and sync the changes
<!-- This is initially just the current tuning(7) manpage with some annotations but hopefully we can pick out what's outdated and improve it to become the new tuning(7) manpage. Feel free to (in fact I want you to,) correct my mistakes 
STORAGE SETUP
Partitioning isn't really performance tuning related, except for swap perhaps. Maybe the filesystem-specific discussion should move to its own page? --DougWhite FreeBSD/amd64 9.0 kitchen sink install = 2.7GB, of that ~1.2GB is ports and 750MB is src. --DougWhite
Swap
Size swap space to approximately twice the size of main memory on systems with less than 4GB RAM and the size of main memory for systems with more than 4GB. If in doubt, allocate more swap; allocating insufficient swap is far worse than allocating too much. If the system has multiple disks, reduce swap I/O contention by spreading swap across the disks, ideally in equally sized partitions.
/var
How you size your /var partition depends heavily on what you intend to use the machine for. This partition is primarily used to hold mailboxes, mail queues, print spools, and log files. If your machine will act as a mail or print server, or you are running a heavily visited web server, you should consider creating a much larger partition.
/tmp vs /var/tmp usage needs further consideration, especially now that bsdinstall creates a separate /tmp but leaves /var/tmp on /var. I deleted the existing text since it was unnecessarily dense, though. --DougWhite
/usr
The /usr partition holds the bulk of the files required to support the system and a subdirectory within it called /usr/local holds the bulk of the files installed from the ports(7) hierarchy. If you do not use ports all that much and do not intend to keep system source (/usr/src) on the machine, you can get away with a 1 gigabyte /usr partition. However, if you install a lot of ports (especially window managers and Linux-emulated binaries), we recommend at least a 30 GB /usr and if you also intend to keep system source on the machine, we recommend a 40 GB /usr. Do not underestimate the amount of space you will need in this partition, it can creep up and surprise you!
The /home partition is typically used to hold user-specific data. I usu- ally size it to the remainder of the disk.
Why partition at all? Why not create one big / partition and be done with it? Then I do not have to worry about undersizing things! Well, there are several reasons this is not a good idea. First, each partition has different operational characteristics and separating them allows the file system to tune itself to those characteristics. For example, the root and /usr partitions are read-mostly, with very little writing, while a lot of reading and writing could occur in /var and /var/tmp. By properly partitioning your system fragmentation introduced in the smaller more heavily write-loaded partitions will not bleed over into the mostly- read partitions. Additionally, keeping the write-loaded partitions closer to the edge of the disk (i.e., before the really big partitions instead of after in the partition table) will increase I/O performance in the partitions where you need it the most. Now it is true that you might also need I/O performance in the larger partitions, but they are so large that shifting them more towards the edge of the disk will not lead to a significant performance improvement whereas moving /var to the edge can have a huge impact. Finally, there are safety concerns. Having a small neat root partition that is essentially read-only gives it a greater chance of surviving a bad crash intact.
Properly partitioning your system also allows you to tune newfs(8), and tunefs(8) parameters. Tuning newfs(8) requires more experience but can lead to significant improvements in performance. There are two parameters that are relatively safe to tune: bytes/i-node, and cylinders/group.
If a large partition is intended to be used to hold fewer, larger files, such as database files, you can increase the bytes/i-node ratio which reduces the number of i-nodes (maximum number of files and directories that can be created) for that partition. Decreasing the number of i-nodes in a file system can greatly reduce fsck(8) recovery times after a crash. Do not use this option unless you are actually storing large files on the partition, because if you overcompensate you can wind up with a file system that has lots of free space remaining but cannot accommodate any more files. Using 64KiB, 128KiB, or 256KiB bytes/i-node is recommended. You can go higher but it will have only incremental effects on fsck(8) recovery times. For example, "newfs -i 65536 ...".
tunefs(8) may be used to further tune a file system. This command can be run in single-user mode without having to reformat the file system. However, this is possibly the most abused program in the system. Many people attempt to increase available file system space by setting the minfree percentage to 0. This can lead to severe file system fragmentation and we do not recommend that you do this. Really the only tunefs(8) option worthwhile here is turning on softupdates with 'tunefs -n enable /filesystem'. Softupdates can be turned on using the -U option to newfs(8), and bsdinstall(8) will typically enable softupdates automatically for non-root file systems). For 9.x softupdates journaling is also worth turning on, for SSDs it's worth enabling trim.
Softupdates drastically improves meta-data performance, mainly file creation and deletion. We recommend enabling softupdates on most file systems; however, there are two limitations to softupdates that you should be aware of when determining whether to use it on a file system. First, softupdates guarantees file system consistency in the case of a crash but could very easily be several seconds (even a minute!) behind on pending write to the physical disk. If you crash you may lose more work than otherwise. Secondly, softupdates delays the freeing of file system blocks. If you have a file system (such as the root file system) which is close to full, doing a major update of it, e.g. "make installworld", can run it out of space and cause the update to fail. For this reason, softupdates will not be enabled on the root file system during a typical install. There is no loss of performance since the root file system is rarely written to.
A number of run-time mount(8) options exist that can help you tune the system. The most obvious and most dangerous one is async. Only use this option in conjunction with gjournal(8), as it is far too dangerous on a normal file system. A less dangerous and more useful mount(8) option is called noatime. UNIX file systems normally update the last-accessed time of a file or directory whenever it is accessed. This operation is handled in FreeBSD with a delayed write and normally does not create a burden on the system. However, if your system is accessing a huge number of files on a continuing basis the buffer cache can wind up getting polluted with atime updates, creating a burden on the system. For example, if you are running a heavily loaded web site, or a news server with lots of readers, you might want to consider turning off atime updates on your larger partitions with this mount(8) option. However, you should not gratuitously turn off atime updates everywhere. For example, the /var file system customarily holds mailboxes, and atime (in combination with mtime) is used to determine whether a mailbox has new mail. You might as well leave atime turned on for mostly read-only partitions such as / and /usr as well. This is especially useful for / since some system utilities use the atime field for reporting.
STRIPING DISKS
In larger systems you can stripe partitions from several drives together to create a much larger overall partition. Striping can also improve the performance of a file system by splitting I/O operations across two or more disks. The gstripe(8), gvinum(8), and ccdconfig(8) utilities may be used to create simple striped file systems. Generally speaking, striping smaller partitions such as the root and /var/tmp, or essentially read- only partitions such as /usr is a complete waste of time. You should only stripe partitions that require serious I/O performance, typically /var, /home, or custom partitions used to hold databases and web pages. Choosing the proper stripe size is also important. File systems tend to store meta-data on power-of-2 boundaries and you usually want to reduce seeking rather than increase seeking. This means you want to use a large off-center stripe size such as 1152 sectors so sequential I/O does not seek both disks and so meta-data is distributed across both disks rather than concentrated on a single disk. If you really need to get sophisticated, we recommend using a real hardware RAID controller from the list of FreeBSD supported controllers.
SYSCTL TUNING
sysctl(8) variables permit system behavior to be monitored and controlled at run-time. Some sysctls simply report on the behavior of the system; others allow the system behavior to be modified; some may be set at boot time using rc.conf(5), but most will be set via sysctl.conf(5). There are several hundred sysctls in the system, including many that appear to be candidates for tuning but actually are not. In this document we will only cover the ones that have the greatest effect on the system.
- The vm.overcommit sysctl defines the overcommit behaviour of the vm subsystem. The virtual memory system always does accounting of the swap space reservation, both total for system and per-user. Corresponding values are available through sysctl vm.swap_total, that gives the total bytes available for swapping, and vm.swap_reserved, that gives number of bytes that may be needed to back all currently allocated anonymous memory. Setting bit 0 of the vm.overcommit sysctl causes the virtual memory system to return failure to the process when allocation of memory causes vm.swap_reserved to exceed vm.swap_total. Bit 1 of the sysctl enforces RLIMIT_SWAP limit (see getrlimit(2)). Root is exempt from this limit. Bit 2 allows to count most of the physical memory as allocatable, except wired and free reserved pages (accounted by vm.stats.vm.v_free_target and vm.stats.vm.v_wire_count sysctls, respectively).
- The kern.ipc.shm_use_phys sysctl defaults to 0 (off) and may be set to 0 (off) or 1 (on). Setting this parameter to 1 will cause all System V shared memory segments to be mapped to unpageable physical RAM. This feature only has an effect if you are either (A) mapping small amounts of shared memory across many (hundreds) of processes, or (B) mapping large amounts of shared memory across any number of processes. This feature allows the kernel to remove a great deal of internal memory management page-tracking overhead at the cost of wiring the shared memory into core, making it unswappable.
- The vfs.write_behind sysctl defaults to 1 (on). This tells the file system to issue media writes as full clusters are collected, which typically occurs when writing large sequential files. The idea is to avoid saturating the buffer cache with dirty buffers when it would not benefit I/O performance. However, this may stall processes and under certain circumstances you may wish to turn it off.
- The vfs.hirunningspace sysctl determines how much outstanding write I/O may be queued to disk controllers system-wide at any given time. It is used by the UFS file system. The default is self-tuned and usually sufficient but on machines with advanced controllers and lots of disks this may be tuned up to match what the controllers buffer. Configuring this setting to match tagged queuing capabilities of controllers or drives with average IO size used in production works best (for example: 16 MiB will use 128 tags with IO requests of 128 KiB). Note that setting too high a value (exceeding the buffer cache's write threshold) can lead to extremely bad clustering performance. Do not set this value arbitrarily high! Higher write queueing values may also add latency to reads occurring at the same time.
- The vfs.read_max sysctl governs VFS read-ahead and is expressed as the number of blocks to pre-read if the heuristics algorithm decides that the reads are issued sequentially. It is used by the UFS, ext2fs and msdosfs file systems. With the default UFS block size of 32KiB, a setting of vfs.read_max=64 (the default value in 9.x) will allow speculatively reading up to 2048 KiB. (The formula is: block size * vfs.read_max). This setting may be increased to get around disk I/O latencies, especially where these latencies are large such as in virtual machine emulated environments. It may be tuned down in specific cases where the I/O load is such that read-ahead adversely affects performance or where system memory is really low.
IIRC mav@ wrote a mail as part of his MAXPHYS work where he explained that a value of 128 was a good value in his FS tests, needs to be looked up in the archives and investigated. http://kb.lsi.com/knowledgebasearticle14852.aspx (link is unreachable) lists increasing this as a recommended tuning although they use higher numbers, http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/RAID,_performance_tests (found via google, last updated 2007) says "The read-ahead cache was changed from the default value of 8 to 128 for all tests performed, using sysctl -w vfs.read_max=128. Initial testing showed that dramatic performance increases occurred for all tested configurations, including baseline single-drive, with increases of vfs.read_max. The value of 128 was arrived at by continuing to double vfs.read_max until no further significant performance increase was to be seen (at vfs.read_max=256) and backing down to the last value tried." Finally, http://ivoras.sharanet.org/blog/tree/2010-11-19.ufs-read-ahead.html (link is unreachable) IvanVoras discusses tuning this here.
The vfs.ncsizefactor sysctl defines how large VFS namecache may grow. The number of currently allocated entries in namecache is provided by debug.numcache sysctl and the condition debug.numcache < kern.maxvnodes * vfs.ncsizefactor is adhered to.
The vfs.ncnegfactor sysctl defines how many negative entries VFS namecache is allowed to create. The number of currently allocated negative entries is provided by debug.numneg sysctl and the condition vfs.ncnegfactor * debug.numneg < debug.numcache is adhered to.
- There are various other buffer-cache and VM page cache related sysctls. We do not recommend modifying these values. As of FreeBSD 4.3, the VM system does an extremely good job tuning itself.
As an additional management tool you can use pipes in your firewall rules (see ipfw(8)) to limit the bandwidth going to or from particular IP blocks or ports. For example, if you have a T1 you might want to limit your web traffic to 70% of the T1's bandwidth in order to leave the remainder available for mail and interactive use. Normally a heavily loaded web server will not introduce significant latencies into other services even if the network link is maxed out, but enforcing a limit can smooth things out and lead to longer term stability. Many people also enforce artificial bandwidth limitations in order to ensure that they are not charged for using too much bandwidth.
Setting the send or receive TCP buffer to values larger than 65535 will result in a marginal performance improvement unless both hosts support the window scaling extension of the TCP protocol, which is controlled by the net.inet.tcp.rfc1323 sysctl. These extensions should be enabled and the TCP buffer size should be set to a value larger than 65536 in order to obtain good performance from certain types of network links; specifically, gigabit WAN links and high-latency satellite links. RFC1323 support is enabled by default.
- The net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive sysctl determines whether or not the TCP implementation should attempt to detect dead TCP connections by intermittently delivering "keepalives" on the connection. By default, this is enabled for all applications; by setting this sysctl to 0, only applications that specifically request keepalives will use them. In most environments, TCP keepalives will improve the management of system state by expiring dead TCP connections, particularly for systems serving dialup users who may not always terminate individual TCP connections before disconnecting from the network. However, in some environments, temporary network outages may be incorrectly identified as dead sessions, resulting in unexpectedly terminated TCP connections. In such environments, setting the sysctl to 0 may reduce the occurrence of TCP session disconnections.
- The net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack TCP feature is largely misunderstood. Historically speaking, this feature was designed to allow the acknowledgment to transmitted data to be returned along with the response. For example, when you type over a remote shell, the acknowledgment to the character you send can be returned along with the data representing the echo of the character. With delayed acks turned off, the acknowledgment may be sent in its own packet, before the remote service has a chance to echo the data it just received. This same concept also applies to any interactive protocol (e.g. SMTP, WWW, POP3), and can cut the number of tiny packets flowing across the network in half. The FreeBSD delayed ACK implementation also follows the TCP protocol rule that at least every other packet be acknowledged even if the standard 100ms timeout has not yet passed. Normally the worst a delayed ACK can do is slightly delay the teardown of a connection, or slightly delay the ramp-up of a slowstart TCP connection. While we are not sure we believe that the several FAQs related to packages such as SAMBA and SQUID which advise turning off delayed acks may be referring to the slow-start issue. In FreeBSD, it would be more beneficial to increase the slow-start flightsize via the net.inet.tcp.slowstart_flightsize sysctl rather than disable delayed acks.
- Adjusting net.inet.tcp.inflight.stab is not recommended. This parameter defaults to 20, representing 2 maximal packets added to the bandwidth delay product window calculation. The additional window is required to stabilize the algorithm and improve responsiveness to changing conditions, but it can also result in higher ping times over slow links (though still much lower than you would get without the inflight algorithm). In such cases you may wish to try reducing this parameter to 15, 10, or 5, and you may also have to reduce net.inet.tcp.inflight.min (for example, to 3500) to get the desired effect. Reducing these parameters should be done as a last resort only.
net.inet.tcp.nolocaltimewait=1 -> stops creating any state (nor socket neither compressed tcpw) for the TCP connection where both endpoints were local. This saves resources on a server running HTTP accelerators or database servers+clients.
- The net.inet.ip.portrange.* sysctls control the port number ranges automatically bound to TCP and UDP sockets. There are three ranges: a low range, a default range, and a high range, selectable via the IP_PORTRANGE setsockopt(2) call. Most network programs use the default range which is controlled by net.inet.ip.portrange.first and net.inet.ip.portrange.last, which default to 49152 and 65535, respectively. Bound port ranges are used for outgoing connections, and it is possible to run the system out of ports under certain circumstances. This most commonly occurs when you are running a heavily loaded web proxy. The port range is not an issue when running a server which handles mainly incoming connections, such as a normal web server, or has a limited number of outgoing connections, such as a mail relay. For situations where you may run out of ports, we recommend decreasing net.inet.ip.portrange.first modestly. A range of 10000 to 30000 ports may be reasonable. You should also consider firewall effects when changing the port range. Some firewalls may block large ranges of ports (usually low-numbered ports) and expect systems to use higher ranges of ports for outgoing connections. By default net.inet.ip.portrange.last is set at the maximum allowable port number.
- The kern.ipc.somaxconn sysctl limits the size of the listen queue for accepting new TCP connections. The default value of 128 is typically too low for robust handling of new connections in a heavily loaded web server environment. For such environments, we recommend increasing this value to 1024 or higher. The service daemon may itself limit the listen queue size (e.g. sendmail(8), apache) but will often have a directive in its configuration file to adjust the queue size up. Larger listen queues also do a better job of fending off denial of service attacks.
- The kern.maxfiles sysctl determines how many open files the system supports. The default is typically a few thousand but you may need to bump this up to ten or twenty thousand if you are running databases or large descriptor-heavy daemons. The read-only kern.openfiles sysctl may be interrogated to determine the current number of open files on the system.
- The vm.swap_idle_enabled sysctl is useful in large multi-user systems where you have lots of users entering and leaving the system and lots of idle processes. Such systems tend to generate a great deal of continuous pressure on free memory reserves. Turning this feature on and adjusting the swapout hysteresis (in idle seconds) via vm.swap_idle_threshold1 and vm.swap_idle_threshold2 allows you to depress the priority of pages associated with idle processes more quickly then the normal pageout algorithm. This gives a helping hand to the pageout daemon. Do not turn this option on unless you need it, because the tradeoff you are making is to essentially pre-page memory sooner rather than later, eating more swap and disk bandwidth. In a small system this option will have a detrimental effect but in a large system that is already doing moderate paging this option allows the VM system to stage whole processes into and out of memory more easily.
To add for desktop interactivity: kern.sched.preempt_thresh (=220)... see Message-ID 4C85D0C5.7060603@icyb.net.ua Tuning the scheduler? (freebsd-stable) for a description
net.link.ether.inet.maxhold (9+; for system <9 it was hardcoded to 1): system wide max number of packets in the ARP queue.
LOADER TUNABLES
Some aspects of the system behavior may not be tunable at runtime because memory allocations they perform must occur early in the boot process. To change loader tunables, you must set their values in loader.conf(5) and reboot the system.
- kern.maxusers controls the scaling of a number of static system tables, including defaults for the maximum number of open files, sizing of network memory resources, etc. As of FreeBSD 4.5, kern.maxusers is automatically sized at boot based on the amount of memory available in the system, and may be determined at run-time by inspecting the value of the read-only kern.maxusers sysctl. Some sites will require larger or smaller values of kern.maxusers and may set it as a loader tunable; values of 64, 128, and 256 are not uncommon. We do not recommend going above 256 unless you need a huge number of file descriptors; many of the tunable values set to their defaults by kern.maxusers may be individually overridden at boot-time or run-time as described elsewhere in this document. Systems older than FreeBSD 4.4 must set this value via the kernel config(8) option maxusers instead.
- The kern.dfldsiz and kern.dflssiz tunables set the default soft limits for process data and stack size respectively. Processes may increase these up to the hard limits by calling setrlimit(2). The kern.maxdsiz, kern.maxssiz, and kern.maxtsiz tunables set the hard limits for process data, stack, and text size respectively; processes may not exceed these limits. The kern.sgrowsiz tunable controls how much the stack segment will grow when a process needs to allocate more stack.
- kern.ipc.nmbclusters may be adjusted to increase the number of network mbufs the system is willing to allocate. Each cluster represents approximately 2K of memory, so a value of 1024 represents 2M of kernel memory reserved for network buffers. You can do a simple calculation to figure out how many you need. If you have a web server which maxes out at 1000 simultaneous connections, and each connection eats a 16K receive and 16K send buffer, you need approximately 32MB worth of network buffers to deal with it. A good rule of thumb is to multiply by 2, so 32MBx2 = 64MB/2K = 32768. So for this case you would want to set kern.ipc.nmbclusters to 32768. We recommend values between 1024 and 4096 for machines with moderates amount of memory, and between 4096 and 32768 for machines with greater amounts of memory. Under no circumstances should you specify an arbitrarily high value for this parameter, it could lead to a boot-time crash. The -m option to netstat(1) may be used to observe network cluster use. Older versions of FreeBSD do not have this tunable and require that the kernel config(8) option NMBCLUSTERS be set instead.
Please note that some drivers require larger values, and in some cases the interfaces will not function; some drivers are known to hang on probe/configuration, e.g. some dual-port or quad-port igb(4), cards, or cause system panics, e.g. cxgb(4), if you set kern.ipc.nmbclusters to something less than 50000 and 75000, respectively.
More and more programs are using the sendfile(2) system call to transmit files over the network. The kern.ipc.nsfbufs sysctl controls the number of file system buffers sendfile(2) is allowed to use to perform its work. This parameter nominally scales with kern.maxusers so you should not need to modify this parameter except under extreme circumstances. See the TUNING section in the sendfile(2) manual page for details.
KERNEL CONFIG TUNING
There are a number of kernel options that you may have to fiddle with in a large-scale system. In order to change these options you need to be able to compile a new kernel from source. The config(8) manual page and the handbook are good starting points for learning how to do this. Generally the first thing you do when creating your own custom kernel is to strip out all the drivers and services you do not use. Removing things like INET6 and drivers you do not have will reduce the size of your kernel, sometimes by a megabyte or more, leaving more memory available for applications.
kern.cam.boot_delay may be used to reduce system boot times. The defaults are fairly high and can be responsible for 5+ seconds of delay in the boot process. Reducing kern.cam.boot_delay to something below 5 seconds could work (especially with modern drives).
There are a number of *_CPU options that can be commented out. If you only want the kernel to run on a Pentium class CPU, you can easily remove I486_CPU, but only remove I586_CPU if you are sure your CPU is being recognized as a Pentium II or better. Some clones may be recognized as a Pentium or even a 486 and not be able to boot without those options. If it works, great! The operating system will be able to better use higher-end CPU features for MMU, task switching, timebase, and even device operations. Additionally, higher-end CPUs support 4MB MMU pages, which the kernel uses to map the kernel itself into memory, increasing its efficiency under heavy syscall loads.
MAXPHYS=(1024*1024) for 9+, a mail from mav@ has to be searched for a good description.
IDE WRITE CACHING
FreeBSD 4.3 flirted with turning off IDE write caching. This reduced write bandwidth to IDE disks but was considered necessary due to serious data consistency issues introduced by hard drive vendors. Basically the problem is that IDE drives lie about when a write completes. With IDE write caching turned on, IDE hard drives will not only write data to disk out of order, they will sometimes delay some of the blocks indefinitely under heavy disk load. A crash or power failure can result in serious file system corruption. So our default was changed to be safe. Unfortunately, the result was such a huge loss in performance that we caved in and changed the default back to on after the release. You should check the default on your system by observing the hw.ata.wc sysctl variable. If IDE write caching is turned off, you can turn it back on by setting the hw.ata.wc loader tunable to 1. More information on tuning the ATA driver system may be found in the ata(4) manual page. If you need performance, go with SCSI.
CPU, MEMORY, DISK
The type of tuning you do depends heavily on where your system begins to bottleneck as load increases. If your system runs out of CPU (idle times are perpetually 0%) then you need to consider upgrading the CPU or moving to an SMP motherboard (multiple CPU's), or perhaps you need to revisit the programs that are causing the load and try to optimize them. If your system is paging to swap a lot you need to consider adding more memory. If your system is saturating the disk you typically see high CPU idle times and total disk saturation. systat(1) can be used to monitor this. As can gstat(8)
There are many solutions to saturated disks: increasing memory for caching, mirroring disks, distributing operations across several machines, and so forth. If disk performance is an issue and you are using IDE drives, switching to SCSI can help a great deal. While modern IDE drives compare with SCSI in raw sequential bandwidth, the moment you start seeking around the disk SCSI drives usually win.
NETWORK
POWER MANAGEMENT
A processor frequency (ticks per second) determines how much work (instructions processed per second) can be done. CPU-bound (intensive) tasks can run faster with higher CPU frequency. More work done (more tasks per second) causes more switchings in integrated circuits, which consumes more current, which causes more power consumption. Even when no CPU tasks are performed (idle state), higher CPU frequency causes some power consumption. From the point of view of source of power (AC or battery), higher voltage enables higher power supply, but in turn also possibly higher power consumption.
In order to reduce power consumption, it is advantageous to modulate CPU frequency and its voltage when:
- CPU is idle
- when CPU performs tasks (by optimized modulation based on curve of power consumption)
- power supply comes from a battery
- increased work load causes increased thermal load and dissipation and loss of energy (increased power consumption)
The power management works by modulating CPU frequency and voltage by means of:
- CPU states control
- P-states (CPU performance states)
- They are defined by ACPI specs. They determine the ability of a working CPU (under load) to save power consumption and reduce the peak thermal load. To operate at any P-state, the CPU must be in the C0 operational state where the processor is working (under load) and not idling. The number of P-states is processor specific. Both frequency and voltage are scaled as the P-state changes. Higher P-state numbers represent lower frequencies (slower processor speeds). Power consumption is lower at higher P-states.
- C-states (CPU operating states)
- They are defined by ACPI specs. They determine an ability of an idle CPU to turn off unused components to save power. They are idle CPU states, except C0 in which the CPU is active (under load). Higher C-state numbers represent deeper CPU sleep states, at which correspondingly more components shut down to save power. Some components that are shut down include stopping the CPU clock and stopping interrupts. A disadvantage is that deeper sleep states have slower wakeup times. C1 is the default state.
- NOTE: P-states and C-states are orthogonal (each can vary independently of the other).
- $ sysctl -e dev.cpu
- P-states (CPU performance states)
- thermal control
- The CPU Frequency Thermal Control, also called throttling, can be implemented via an older external mechanism or via TCC (also called P4TCC).
- $ sysctl -e dev.p4tcc
Power management with powerd daemon (P-states and C-states). POWERD(8). The default mode is adaptive for battery and hiadaptive for other (AC power).
- $ ps auxww | grep powerd
An example of user configuration (be careful of using non-default values as they may shut down some system components, and the entire system as a result of it).
/etc/rc.conf:
powerd_flags="-n hadp" performance_cx_lowest="C2" economy_cx_lowest="C2" performance_cpu_freq="HIGH"
More info: TuningPowerConsumption
Links
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/Help_my_system_is_slow.pdf
http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/RAID,_performance_tests
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/blog/tree/2010-11-19.ufs-read-ahead.html -->