First of all, I rebuilt the FreeBSD kernel, the main purpose was to remove unnecessary driver components such as CPU type, SCSI, network adapter and USB support, they are not needed on my server at all.
Modify /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC file to remove the unnecessary entries. Before that, you should be familiar with your hardware model.
Then compile and install the kernel:
- /usr/sbin/config GENERIC
- cd ../compile/GENERIC
- make cleandepend && make depend
- make
- make install
You need modify the GENERIC configuration file if you get any error during the 'make'.
At last, reboot the system.
Secondly, enable the 'Soft Updates' to improve the disk performance.
You should enter the single user mode (boot -s) to finish the task.
- /sbin/tunefs -n enable /home
- /sbin/tunefs -n enable /tmp
- /sbin/tunefs -n enable /var
- /sbin/tunefs -n enable /other_partition
The root partition / is not recommended to enable 'Soft Update'
And then reboot the system.
Verify: when the system is up, type 'mount' to check if 'Soft Updates' is enabled or not, on my system, I enabled this feature for each partition.
[root@www ~]# mount
/dev/ad0s1a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
/dev/ad0s1f on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1d on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1g on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s1e on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
How disk performance improved?
I did a disk read/write test by using a simple C language program.
# ./postmark
pm>set size 10000 20000
pm>set number 1000
pm>set transactions 50000
pm>run
Before tuning:
1 Transactions/s: 34
2 DATE READ: 272.96 K/S
3 DATE WRITTEN: 281.46K/S
After tuning:
1 Transactions/s: 122
2 DATE READ: 983.70 K/S
3DATE WRITTEN: 1014.33K/S
So we can see that 'Soft Updates' feature improves the disk performance greatly.
For more details, please refer to the official document about 'Soft Updates'
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