Re: How to optimize system time for such case?

From: Daniel J Blueman
Date: Thu Nov 02 2006 - 04:28:03 EST


On 02/11/06, miles <zhfeng.osprey@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 11/2/06, Daniel J Blueman <daniel.blueman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> FENG ZHOU wrote:
> > Hello, all
> > I am optimizing a compiler and I believe there is a bug in such
> > compile. Currently, I have a test case, which is a scientific
> > application, has a lot of system time. This is weird, because this
> > case does not have many system calls. Meanwhile, compiled at another
> > option, I found all the "system time" are gone! So, I assume there is
> > some problem in the first one (though both binary produce correct
> > result). I used some performance tuning tool and found the hottest
> > address for CPU privilege level change event is: 0xa000000100001a70.
> > This address is not in code or data segment. Now, I am kinda stuck
> > here. My question is: how to find what this address is? Or find out
> > what is the cause of the "system time"? Thanks in advance.
> >
> > PS: the platform is Itanium 2.
> > -Feng
>
> First question is what kernel, second is how much memory?
>
> I recently had this experience (high system time) with some vendor
> kernels with a system with 16GB of memory and 4-8GB processes. The VM
> was trying to reclaim pages like crazy, but failing.

The system is a debian3.1 with 2.6.8 #1 SMP kernel. The total memory is 4GB.
Total number of processes is about 100. It is a SPEC CPU program.

I'd say it's worth a shot with a more modern kernel. There are
probably related bugs in that kernel. The one I had (related, but not
directly) problems with was 2.6.9 + vendor patches.
--
Daniel J Blueman
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/