[CentOS] CentOS 4.4-IBM Netvista Performace Problems, help needed.

Wed Feb 21 10:04:59 UTC 2007
Chuck Mattern <camattern at acm.org>

First a grateful thank you to the individuals who posted responses and 
an apology for not turning around faster.  My day job is plagued with a 
project that distinctly resembles the maiden voyage of HMS Titanic and 
has been getting the best of me. 

I'm trying the later fixes suggested in the bugzilla entry pointed to by 
Zoran below (booting with " noapic noacpi apic=off acpi=off").  
Interestingly I had noted several of the issues covered in the 
responses, different irq handling, ide disk involvement (the onset of 
time problems seems to be hastened by high disk io).  I'll report back 
on the results.

Regards,
Chuck

Zoran Milojevic wrote:
> On 2/18/07, Chuck Mattern <camattern at acm.org> wrote:
>> -Systems will bog down critically after approximately 24 hours loosing
>> system time at an increasing rate,
>
> We have several IBM boxes (NetVista mostly) @work that would exhibit
> similar behavior - run normally at first, then after a few hours the
> system clock practically stops; I measured 2 minutes of wall-clock
> time for a "sleep 1" to return, and up to 20 seconds for "usleep 1"...
> Tried updating BIOS, kernel (4.3, 4.4, updates), some combinations of
> boot time parameters (as in: clock={pit|pmtmr|..}, noapic, acpi=off
> and the like), without improvement. We just gave up on those due to
> the lack of time.
>
> See also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203818
> Solution from comment 18 may help (that comment was submitted after
> we've given up, not sure if it was tried).
>
> Cheers,
> Zoran