Re: Although CONFIG_IRQBALANCE is enabled IRQ's don't seem to bebalanced very well

From: Martin Bligh
Date: Tue Jan 10 2006 - 17:11:04 EST


Jesper Juhl wrote:
On 1/10/06, Martin Bligh <mbligh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Josef Sipek wrote:

On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 12:14:42PM +0100, Jesper Juhl wrote:


Do I need any userspace tools in addition to CONFIG_IRQBALANCE?


Last I checked, yes you do need "irqbalance" (at least that's what
the package is called in debian.

Nope - you need the kernel option turned on OR the userspace daemon,
not both.


Ok, good to know.


If you're not generating interrupts at a high enough rate, it won't
rotate. That's deliberate.



Hmm, and what would count as "a high enough rate"?

I just did a small test with thousands of ping -f's through my NIC
while at the same time giving the disk a good workout with tons of
find's, sync's & updatedb's - that sure did drive up the number of
interrupts and my load average went sky high (amazingly the box was
still fairly responsive):

root@dragon:/home/juhl# uptime
22:59:58 up 12:43, 1 user, load average: 1015.48, 715.93, 429.07

but, not a single interrupt was handled by CPU1, they all went to CPU0.

Do you have a good way to drive up the nr of interrupts above the
treshhold for balancing?

Is it HT? ISTR it was intelligent enough to ignore that. But you'd
have to look at the code to be sure.

M.
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