Re: Mainline kernel OLTP performance update

[Andrew Morton]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:12:46 -0500 James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-01-14 at 18:04 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:21:47 -0700 Matthew Wilcox <matthew@xxxxxx> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 04:35:57PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > > > Linux OLTP Performance summary
> > > > > > Kernel#            Speedup(x)   Intr/s  CtxSw/s us%  sys%   idle%  iowait%
> > > > > > 2.6.24.2                1.000   21969   43425   76   24     0      0
> > > > > > 2.6.27.2                0.973   30402   43523   74   25     0      1
> > > > > > 2.6.29-rc1              0.965   30331   41970   74   26     0      0
> > > 
> > > > But the interrupt rate went through the roof.
> > > 
> > > Yes.  I forget why that was; I'll have to dig through my archives for
> > > that.
> > 
> > Oh.  I'd have thought that this alone could account for 3.5%.
> 
> Me too.  Anecdotally, I haven't noticed this in my lab machines, but
> what I have noticed is on someone else's laptop (a hyperthreaded atom)
> that I was trying to demo powertop on was that IPI reschedule interrupts
> seem to be out of control ... they were ticking over at a really high
> rate and preventing the CPU from spending much time in the low C and P
> states.  To me this implicates some scheduler problem since that's the
> primary producer of IPI reschedules ... I think it wouldn't be a
> significant extrapolation to predict that the scheduler might be the
> cause of the above problem as well.
> 

Good point.

The context switch rate actually went down a bit.

I wonder if the Intel test people have records of /proc/interrupts for
the various kernel versions.

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