Re: PROBLEM: high system usage / poor SMP network performance

[Vincent Sweeney]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Cox" <[e-mail]>
To: "Vincent Sweeney" <[e-mail]>
Cc: <[e-mail]>
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2002 10:54 PM
Subject: Re: PROBLEM: high system usage / poor SMP network performance

> >     CPU0 states: 27.2% user, 62.4% system,  0.0% nice,  9.2% idle
> >     CPU1 states: 28.4% user, 62.3% system,  0.0% nice,  8.1% idle
>
> The important bit here is     ^^^^^^^^ that one. Something is causing
> horrendous lock contention it appears. Is the e100 driver optimised for
SMP
> yet ? Do you get better numbers if you use the eepro100 driver ?

I've switched a server over to the default eepro100 driver as supplied in
2.4.17 (compiled as a module). This is tonights snapshot with about 10%
higher user count than above (2200 connections per ircd)

  7:25pm  up  5:44,  2 users,  load average: 0.85, 1.01, 1.09
38 processes: 33 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 27.3% user, 69.3% system,  0.0% nice,  2.2% idle
CPU1 states: 26.1% user, 71.2% system,  0.0% nice,  2.0% idle
Mem:   385096K av,  232960K used,  152136K free,       0K shrd,    4724K
buff
Swap:  379416K av,       0K used,  379416K free                   21780K
cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
  659 ircd      15   0 74976  73M   660 R    96.7 19.4 263:21 ircd
  666 ircd      14   0 75004  73M   656 R    95.5 19.4 253:10 ircd

So as you can see the numbers are almost the same, though they were worse at
lower users than the e100 driver (~45% system per cpu at 1000 users per ircd
with eepro100,  ~30% with e100).

I will try the profiling tomorrow with the eepro100 driver compiled into the
kernel, I was unable to do the same for the Intel e100 driver today as I
discovered that the Intel driver can currenty only be compiled as a module.

Vince.