Re: [PATCH] lazy freeing of memory through MADV_FREE

[Rik van Riel]

Eric Dumazet wrote:
> Rik van Riel a Ãcrit :
> > Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:38:06 -0400
> > > Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I've also merged Nick's "mm: madvise avoid exclusive mmap_sem".
> > > > >
> > > > > - Nick's patch also will help this problem.  It could be that your 
> > > > > patch
> > > > >   no longer offers a 2x speedup when combined with Nick's patch.
> > > > >
> > > > >   It could well be that the combination of the two is even better, 
> > > > > but it
> > > > >   would be nice to firm that up a bit.  
> > > > I'll test that.
> > >
> > > Thanks.
> >
> > Well, good news.
> >
> > It turns out that Nick's patch does not improve peak
> > performance much, but it does prevent the decline when
> > running with 16 threads on my quad core CPU!
> >
> > We _definately_ want both patches, there's a huge benefit
> > in having them both.
> >
> > Here are the transactions/seconds for each combination:
> >
> >    vanilla   new glibc  madv_free kernel   madv_free + mmap_sem
> > threads
> >
> > 1     610         609             596                545
>
> 545 tps versus 610 tps for one thread ? It seems quite bad, no ?
>
> Could you please find an explanation for this ?

I have no idea why this happens.  Especially the last one,
going from a write lock to a read lock on the mmap_sem
should not make ANY difference whatsoever since we're
running single threaded!

> > 2    1032        1136            1196               1200
> > 4    1070        1128            2014               2024
> > 8    1000        1088            1665               2087
> > 16    779        1073            1310               1999

Performance with 2 database threads is way better though,
and performance with 4 or more threads more than doubles...

If you have an explanation on why single threaded performance
went down a little on my quad core system, please let me know.

Does performance suffer at all on a real UP system?

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