Re: -mm seems significanty slower than mainline on kernbench

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Sat Jan 14 2006 - 01:30:55 EST


Peter Williams wrote:
Nick Piggin wrote:


I figured using the weights (which go away for nice=0 tasks) would make it behave nicely with the rest of the load balancing code.


OK, if you keep working on it that would be great.

but I didn't quite look close enough to
work out what's going wrong.


My testing (albeit on an old 2 cpu Celeron) showed no statistically significant difference between with the patch and without. If you ignored the standard deviations and statistical practice and just looked at the raw numbers you'd think it was better with the patch than without it. :-)

I assume that Andy Whitcroft is doing a kernbench with the patch removed from 2.6.15-mm3 (otherwise why would he ask for a patch to do that) and I'm waiting to see how that compares with the run he did with it in. There were other scheduling changes in 2.6.15-mm3 so I think this comparison is needed in order to be sure that any degradation is still due to my patch.

Peter
PS As load balancing maintainer, is the value 128 set in cement for SCHED_LOAD_SCALE? The reason I ask is that if it was changed to be a multiple of NICE_TO_BIAS_PRIO(0) (i.e. 20) my modification could be made slightly more efficient.

Not set in stone but it should really be a power of two because there are
quite a lot of multiplies and divides done with it.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

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