Re: SMP performance degradation with sysbench

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Tue Mar 13 2007 - 06:38:30 EST


Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 09:06:14PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:

Well ignoring the HT issue, I was seeing lots of idle time simply
because userspace could not keep up enough load to the scheduler.
There simply were fewer runnable tasks than CPU cores.


When you said idle I thought idle and not waiting for I/O. Waiting for
I/O would be hardly a kernel issue ;). If they're not waiting for I/O
and they're not scheduling in userland with nanosleep/pause, the cpu
shouldn't go idle. Even if they're calling sched_yield in a loop the
cpu should account for zero idle time as far as I can tell.

Well it wasn't iowait time. From Anton's analysis, I would probably
say it was time waiting for either the glibc malloc mutex or MySQL
heap mutex.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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