2.4.10 still slow compared to 2.4.5pre1

[DICKENS,CARY]

We have run 2.4.10 under a heavy nfs load and kswapd now appears to be under
control ( never went above 88.5%cpu and then only for a short time), but the
nfs performance is about 45% of what it had been for the 2.4.5pre1 kernel.
The response time grows steadily throughout the test until the test goes
invalid.

Hardware:
4 processors, 4GB ram
45 fibre channel drives, set up in hardware RAID 0/1
2 direct Gigabit Ethernet connections between SPEC SFS prime client and
system under test
reiserfs
all NFS filesystems exported with sync,no_wdelay to insure O_SYNC writes to
storage
NFS v3 UDP

I can provide top logs if anyone would like to see what is happening at any
particular time.  Also, if you would like to see some results from a
particular test, please let me know what test it would be.

We tried the 00_vmtweaks patch from Andrea and it failed to boot.  There was
an issue starting kswapd and the kernel would oops.

Cary Dickens
Hewlett-Packard