Linux Format forums

wiz · Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2008 7:01 pm Post subject: Speeding up FreeBSD

I have been using a FreeBSD (7) box and it runs at the speed of a wounded snail. (Q6600 + 2 meg ram)

27 seconds for Firefox to start up, and resizing a window on the desktop takes 5 seconds for it to redraw.

Is there anything obvious that needs changing to make it faster.

wiz · Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2008 7:30 pm Post subject:

Q6600 + 2 gig ram Smile

. Typing arror

david911 · Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2006 12:26 pm Posts: 63

Hi wiz,

I'm thinking of giving BSD 7 a try (when I can get on the server!). I've never, ever tried it before, but there was a bit I noticed in the Handbook which talks about reducing the CPU utilisation under VMWare - would this work on a normal installation?

Set boot loader variables

The most important step is to reduce the kern.hz tunable to reduce the
CPU utilization of FreeBSD under the VMWare environment. This is
accomplished by adding the following line to /boot/loader.conf:
kern.hz=100

Without this setting, an idle FreeBSD VMWare guest OS will use roughly
15% of the CPU of a single processor iMac. After this change the usage
will be closer to a mere 5%.

Like I say - I don't know doodly-squit about BSD, but I hope this helps (if I can get the iso downloaded by the weekend I may be able t try it and post!).

Cheers,

Dave