Upgrade Debian or just change the kernel?

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j o e
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Oct 27, 2010 11:25 pm

Upgrade Debian or just change the kernel?

Post by j o e »

I am running Debian Lenny using my FitPC2 as a file server and suffering from poor performance.
I installed and ran hdparm which returned a speed of 1,9 MB/s
Since I am new to Debian, I wonder: should I upgrade the kernel from 2.6.26 to 2.6.28 or even newer or should I go for Debian Squeeze?
What would you recommend?

maever
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Nov 20, 2010 3:49 pm

Re: Upgrade Debian or just change the kernel?

Post by maever »

Hello Joe,

That is very poor performance indeed.
Yesterday I installed the default debian lenny 32bit setup.
I have to say that with this default kernel I already got the performance i wanted.
hdparm -Tt /dev/sda5

/dev/sda5:
Timing cached reads: 872 MB in 2.00 seconds = 429.21 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 160 MB in 3.00 seconds = 51.82 MB/sec
I installed the Ubuntu 2.6.28-34-fitpc2 kernel on my debian machine ( custom made fitpc2 kernel!) and got the following:
hdparm -Tt /dev/sda5

/dev/sda5:
Timing cached reads: 872 MB in 2.00 seconds = 435.67 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 160 MB in 3.00 seconds = 53.29 MB/sec
I have a WDC WD2500BMVS harddisk.

As you can see, a small performance increase.
I myself have not experienced the issues with the slowdowns you describe, it seems others have.


http://www.fit-pc2.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 5082#p5082
Here is described how to install the custom ubuntu kernel.
One thing I did differently from that guide is that I got the wireless-cdra driver from the Karmic ubuntu release. (since the jaunty repository was not working properly), I installed this manually using dpkg -i [filename] .
this worked like a charm, after that I could easily install the fitpc2 ubuntu kernel.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/wireless-crda

j o e
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Oct 27, 2010 11:25 pm

Re: Upgrade Debian or just change the kernel?

Post by j o e »

Thank you Maever,
I updated to the custom kernel and the disk-speed acc. to hdparm went from 1,9 MB/s to 62 MB/s.
I still have some issues, cannot access the network drive from my XP-client.
Any ideas?

I get some errors during boot (push Ctrl-D to resume), and a log-file checkfs:

Log of fsck -C -R -A -a
Sun Nov 21 14:56:38 2010

fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hda6
/dev/hda6:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

fsck died with exit status 8

Sun Nov 21 14:56:38 2010

j o e
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Oct 27, 2010 11:25 pm

Re: Upgrade Debian or just change the kernel?

Post by j o e »

I also had to change all dev/hda-references in my /etc/fstab to dev/sda
Now it works like a charm and the speed difference is huge if I copy some files to/from the disk or watch avi-files on my client (use FitPc2 as a file server).
As I said earlier, hdparm result went from 1,9 to 62 MB/s :shock:
I am happy :)

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