# upgrade FreeBSD (VPS) from 12.1 to 13 has extreme slow perfomance (UFS)



## bsd33 (Jul 28, 2021)

Alloha All,
 i did an upgrade from my FreeBSD vps to version 13.0 (UFS) and it is very slow.

i created some new clean VPS from scratch and i also have that same slow problem after the upgrade, how can i fix this?

When i run top everything is normal except that the system memory is always above 90% and nothing is installed.

Can you help me?


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## SirDice (Jul 28, 2021)

How much memory does the VM have? Keep in mind that it's normal for a system that's been running for a while to use all its available memory. Most of it is going to be file and process caches. The mantra is "unused memory is useless memory". Those caches are the first to get evicted when there are more pressing memory needs from applications for example.

There's no inherent reason why 13.0 would be slower than 12.x, most people actually notice an increase in performance.


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## bsd33 (Jul 28, 2021)

The memomy is 1024 MB. FreeBSD 11 and 12 worked very good in this small VPS.

I also created a new clean VPS in the Dashboard and i only did an upgrade from 12 to 13 and the performance is extreme slow. If i type a key on the keyboard it take 10 seconds before i see it on the screen.

I think it has to do something with kvm/QEMU?

When i took the subscription 5 years a go, they had a lot of problems to get FreeBSD running as a VPS and Linux was easy for them.


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## SirDice (Jul 28, 2021)

bsd33 said:


> The memory is 1024 MB.


That's really small nowadays. Even a Raspberry Pi has more than that. Most VPS providers start with 2 or 4GB for their "smallest" VPS these days. The smallest you can get with my provider is 2GB and 1 vCPU. I have the next step up, 4GB and 2 vCPUs. 



bsd33 said:


> I think it has to do something with kvm/QEMU?


That's possible. Do you know if they used virtio-blk and virtio-net for the disk and network interfaces? Those should work a lot better.


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## bsd33 (Jul 28, 2021)

Yes it is very small, but i could run 3 java applications in it with 5 jails.

When i run top: some of the process are max around 0,05%

But the system Memory is always above 90% and there is nothing installed, i never had that before.


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## SirDice (Jul 28, 2021)

bsd33 said:


> Yes it is very small, but i could run 3 java applications in it with 5 jails.


It probably used a lot of swap. Java is quite memory hungry. 



bsd33 said:


> But the system Memory is always above 90% and there is nothing installed, i never had that before.


That's actually quite normal. Even on systems with a lot more memory its going to use pretty much all of it. Like I said, most of that is file and process caches. Although on such a small memory system I suspect there's actually very little left over to use as cache. 

Maybe it's time to find another VPS provider that will give you a better deal (more resources for the same amount of money). Try and find one that actually knows how to deal with FreeBSD. (There's a whole thread devoted to FreeBSD friendly providers: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-hosting-shared-vps-etc.21472/)


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## bsd33 (Jul 28, 2021)

no i really want a small VPS.

This small VPS has more power than my raspberry pi and on that Pi FreeBSD run like a charm on it.

I really think my provider scrwd up some hypervisor configuration and that i am the first Freebsd 13 user on their platform.


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## SirDice (Jul 28, 2021)

Can you execute `pciconf -lv | nc termbin.com 9999` and post the URL here? Then we can have a look at the hardware that's being detected.


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## bsd33 (Jul 29, 2021)

Hi SirDice, thank you very much for the responses!

I did what you say: i switched to another FreeBSD VPS provider and i did exactly the same steps in my new very small VPS, and it is working now.  I am so happy!

I was working for 8 hours on this problem..... If i start contacting the Wise Guys (You guyz on this forum), than i have a serious edge case problem. I am a very happy FreeBSD user since 2006.

The problem must be in the QEMU Hypervisor in combination with with FreeBSD 13 Guest.


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## SirDice (Jul 29, 2021)

bsd33 said:


> The problem must be in the QEMU Hypervisor in combination with with FreeBSD 13 Guest.


More likely is the way the old provider configured it. My VPS runs on KVM too and I don't have any issues at all. But my VPS provider knows how to support FreeBSD, so that helps a lot.


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