Hi Mike,
[I am not sure if my earlier mail from lycos went out or not, if
it did, I apologize]
On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 12:16:25PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:
> > The improvement in performance while runnig "chat" benchmark
> > (from http://lbs.sourceforge.net/) is about 30% in average throughput.
>
> isn't this a solution in search of a problem?
> does it make sense to redesign parts of the kernel for the sole
> purpose of making a completely unrealistic benchmark run faster?
Irrespective of the usefulness of the "chat" benchmark, it seems
that there is a problem of scalability as long as CLONE_FILES is
supported. John Hawkes (SGI) posted some nasty numbers on a
32 CPU mips machine in the lse-tech list some time ago.
>
> (the chat "benchmark" is a simple pingpong load-generator; it is
> not in the same category as, say, specweb, since it does not do *any*
> realistic (nonlocal) IO. the numbers "chat" returns are interesting,
> but not indicative of any problem; perhaps even less than lmbench
> components.)
"chat" results for large numbers of CPUs is indicative of a problem -
if a large number of threads share the file_struct through
CLONE_FILES, the performance of the application will deteriorate
beyond 8 CPUs (going by John's numbers). It also indicates how
sensitive can performance be to write access of shared-memory
locations like spin-waiting locks.
Thanks
Dipankar
-- Dipankar Sarma (dipankar@sequent.com) IBM Linux Technology Center IBM Software Lab, Bangalore, India. Project Page: http://lse.sourceforge.net - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Apr 23 2001 - 21:00:21 EST