IO CPU Affinity: more results...

From: Alan D. Brunelle
Date: Wed Mar 26 2008 - 14:24:38 EST


Current blk.git origin/io-cpu-affinity sources:

After 60 successful passes on a 4-way ia64:

60 0 mkfs untar make
60 1 mkfs untar make

Part RQ Min Avg Max Dev
----- -- ------- ------- ------- -------
mkfs 0 81.233 81.810 82.599 0.330
mkfs 1 81.083 81.854 82.973 0.405

untar 0 17.075 17.676 18.098 0.273
untar 1 16.975 17.570 18.128 0.288

make 0 24.231 24.380 24.541 0.085
make 1 24.116 24.312 24.459 0.073
----- -- ------- ------- ------- -------
comb 0 122.898 123.866 125.002 0.516
comb 1 122.620 123.736 125.156 0.521
===== == ======= ======= ======= =======
psys 0 2.12% 2.19% 2.28% 0.035
psys 1 1.92% 2.00% 2.25% 0.049


so:

1. It's working pretty solidly on ia64
2. We still see reduced combined times w/ rq=1 (albeit, not much - and certainly nothing definitive with the relatively high standard deviations).
3. We see large reduction in %system to do the same work - 8% less

And here's something else I've noticed: It seems that as the runs go on, the makes happen quicker (in general). I've got some graphs on free.linux.hp.com - they are a bit busy, but here are some pointers:

1. Black stuff is for rq=0, red stuff is for rq=1
2. Solid horizontal line indicates the set average.
3. Lower numbers for /all/ graphs are better
4. Open circles represent individual test run points
5. Hashed-line w/ shaded large circles represents localized averages: each circle is the average of the surrounding 5 data points.

The last thing is key: you'll see on

http://free.linux.hp.com/~adb/jens/make.png

The black hashed line (rq=0) tends to bop around the average, whilst the red hashed line (rq=1) seems to show a downwards trend. (I need to run this a lot longer to see if it holds up.) Note: this trending-downwards does /not/ appear in the mkfs & untar parts of the operations. /Every/ time I've had extended runs with rq=1 I see this trend.

Note: %sys doesn't really fluctuate much at all - as can be seen by:

http://free.linux.hp.com/~adb/jens/psys.png

The other graphs include:

http://free.linux.hp.com/~adb/jens/mkfs.png
http://free.linux.hp.com/~adb/jens/untar.png
http://free.linux.hp.com/~adb/jens/comb.png

Alan D. Brunelle
HP / OSLO / S&P

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