Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

I was copying large amounts of data back to my Linux server last night...and it was still going this morning...plus other things had failed over night, because load was very high. Main thing was mail was deferring connections. But, irssi was a pain to use.

So, I went googling in the hopes that I might find the answer.

Evidently the problem is that between Linux and the new BIOS and whether to use DMA. It had now defaulted to not using DMA, so now I have to explicitly turn it on.

Once I turned DMA back on...performance shot up....instead of bursts of data over the network peaking at ~26Mbps....it is a fairly sustained 55Mbps. And, the CPU load is dropped to normal.

Yet again, this complicates whether I should go with Linux or (Open)Solaris for the new box I'm building.

Follow up:

Meanwhile, Amazon has shipped my KVM with a revised estimated delivery date of December 31st. I thought about boosting it to next day delivery to ensure that I would get it before the weekend, but decided I'm not in a big enough hurry....so better that its free shipping than fast