CVS client lagging

["William Allen Simpson" <wsimpson_(_at_)_greendragon_(_dot_)_com>]

I must not be living right, because I know nobody else would put up with
this problem, and obviously I must not be correctly configured.  This
system setup has not (yet) changed from the virgin 2.3 CD.

When "CVS up -PAd" is used, CVS just seems to sit and think for
significant lengths of time without any network or disk activity.

The first time I tried, Angelos had me quit after 2 hours, saying that
it should not take that long.  I tried again later and timed it.  For
example, usr/src/usr.sbin took almost 6 hours to run, but only the last
few minutes had the modem lights on solidly and produced "Updating"
messages.

The straw that broken the camel's back was /usr/src/gnu, which took 17.5
hours, with about 20 minutes of actual updating at the end.  To put this
in perspective, it only would have taken about 12 hours to download the
files by modem uncompressed, and probably less than 4 hours compressed.

Looking at the ps -lu, it appears that little CPU is being used.  The ps
taken after roughly 13 hours shows less than 1% cpu, while cvs only got
39.42 minutes and ssh only 5:15 hours.  Even with that ratio for ssh, it
isn't encryption, because the code runs at line speed (network lights on
solidly) during the final updating.

As you can see, I've tried setting down nice, with no improvement.  I've
even tried setting my shell nicer to stay out of the way.  This was a
fresh reboot with nothing else running, not even X.

Why is it blocking?  What is it waiting for?

What can be done?


USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ   RSS TT   STAT STARTED       TIME COMMAND            UID  PPID CPU PRI NI WCHAN
root     13763  0.0  0.7   236   172 C0  RN+   11:02AM    0:00.02 ps -axwul            0 10512   4  31  1 -
root         1  0.0  0.8   304   184 ??  Is    10:02PM    0:00.07 /sbin/init           0     0   0  10  0 wait
root         2  0.0  0.0     0     0 ??  DL    10:02PM    0:00.01 (pagedaemon)         0     0   0 -18  0 paged
root         3  0.0  0.0     0     0 ??  DL    10:02PM    0:11.06 (update)             0     0   0  18  0 syncer
root      3467  0.0  1.4    92   336 ??  Ss    10:03PM    0:00.50 syslogd              0     1   0   2  0 select
root      4608  0.0  1.0    64   244 ??  Is    10:03PM    0:00.03 portmap              0     1   0   2  0 select
root     24857  0.0  1.4   216   332 ??  Is    10:03PM    0:00.80 cron                 0     1   0  10  0 nanosl
root     13122  0.0  1.3    76   320 ??  Is    10:03PM    0:00.09 inetd                0     1   0   2  0 select
root     20400  0.0  1.8   244   428 ??  Is    10:03PM    0:04.23 /usr/local/sbin/     0     1   0   2  0 select
root     10512  0.0  1.1   332   264 C0  SNs   10:03PM    0:01.78 -csh (csh)           0     1   0  18  1 pause
root      7822  0.0  1.4    44   336 C1  Is+   10:03PM    0:00.04 /usr/libexec/get     0     1   1   3  0 ttyin
root     14421  0.0  1.4    44   336 C2  Is+   10:03PM    0:00.04 /usr/libexec/get     0     1   0   3  0 ttyin
root     16439  0.0  1.4    44   336 C3  Is+   10:03PM    0:00.04 /usr/libexec/get     0     1   0   3  0 ttyin
root      9278  0.0  1.4    44   336 C5  Is+   10:03PM    0:00.04 /usr/libexec/get     0     1   1   3  0 ttyin
root     11318  0.0  1.7   156   416 ??  Is    10:07PM    0:00.05 pppd call mn.t       0     1   0   2  0 select
root     11089  0.0 14.5  3556  3548 C0  S<    10:08PM    0:39.42 cvs up -PAd          0 10512 255  -5 -9 pipewr
root     27596  0.2  4.2   648  1024 C0  S<    10:08PM    5:15.28 /usr/local/bin/s     0 11089 255   2 -10 select
root         0  0.0  0.0     0     0 ??  DLs   10:02PM    0:00.10 (swapper)            0     0   0 -18  0 schedu

WSimpson_(_at_)_UMich_(_dot_)_edu
    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32