How can I improve disk and graphic performance?

How can I improve disk and graphic performance?

Disk Performance (iozone)


A typical iozone test with 10 to 20 MB sequential file will give about
2 MB/sec. read/write on a 50 MHz ESIA system on a Maxtor 540SL (8.5 ms)
drive with an Adaptec 2740 controller. You'll get a little better
performance from a 90 MHz Pentium system. A fully thrashed system will
see writes down to about 1 MB/sec. I noticed that the NCR 810/825, etc.,
seem a little more peaky in the performance specially on the PCI bus.


If you're using a fast wide
SCSI controller such as the Adaptec 2940, use a wide SCSI drive for the
system drive.
These drives usually have double the throughput of the
normal 8-bit drives, according to the iozone benchmark results, and they
make the tmpfs fly.


Note: If you're using high speed spindle drivers for your
boot driver, like 5400 and 7200 RPM drives, you may want to use
"set maxpgio=60" for the 5400 RPM drive or
"set maxpgio=80" for the 7200 RPM drives
in your /etc/system file.
This causes the schedpaging to be more efficient.
Enable by typing "touch /reconfigure; /usr/sbin/reboot"


[Andrew Gabriel adds for ATAPI: Read about drive0_block_factor and
drive1_block_factor in /platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/ata.conf (man ata).
Even my oldest ATAPI drives support drive0_block_factor=0x10 without any
trouble.]


For Solaris 8, DMA is disabled for ATAPI devices,
as it caused installs to fail for several BIOSes.
It can be enabled with the "ata-dma-enabled" property from the
Device Configuration Assistant (set it to one).
After installation, you can also change this line in file
/boot/solaris/bootenv.rc:


setprop ata-dma-enabled '1'


If you do this and you have a buggy motherboard chipset, your system won't boot.
You can recover by booting off the DCA and mounting the root filesystem
(see the answer here about recovering from forgotten root passwords).
Buggy chipsets include those with the VIA chipset and ASUS PA5 motherboards.
For more details, see the Solaris 8 Intel Release Notes.
for details.


Graphic Performance (xstone)
Xstones is a little more of a subjective measurement of graphics
performance. The comp.unix.x.i386 newsgroup keeps up on the latest
xstone performance on graphics cards for PC's.


[From Bob Palowoda's Solaris 2.4 x86 FAQ]



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