Re: 2.5.63-mjb2 (scalability / NUMA patchset)

rwhron@earthlink.net
Mon, 3 Mar 2003 08:19:55 -0500


> Pleeeeeeze remember to specify basic things such as the machine,
> amount of memory and especially the filesystem type in use.

>> on uniprocessor K6/2 475 Mhz with 384 MB ram
and two IDE drives on ext2.

Could it be a disk driver issue? Maybe 2.4 has some IDE
enhancements that aren't in 2.5 yet. Sounds crazy, but
this is my reasoning...

On a quad Xeon with QLA2200, the QLogic driver makes the
biggest difference for AIM7 dbase test.

Here is AIM7 dbase on quad Xeon with 3.75 GB ram over ext2:

AIM7 dbase workload
kernel Tasks Jobs/Min Real CPU
2.5.62-mm2 32 555.9 342.0 155.2
2.4.21-pre4aa1 32 554.4 342.8 142.3
2.4.21-pre4aa3 32 551.9 344.4 149.6
2.4.21-pre4-ac3 32 473.8 401.2 147.7
2.5.62 32 473.6 401.3 148.2
2.5.63-mjb2 32 472.5 402.3 161.5
2.5.63 32 471.6 403.1 153.1
2.2.24-rc3 32 431.9 440.1 165.7

2.5.62-mm2 has the feral driver. aa has the QLogic 6.x driver.
Those two kernels rule AIM7 dbase and fserver on quad Xeon with
QLA2200. I tested earlier 2.5 and aa with/without the newer
QLogic drivers. It was _the_most_important_ factor for AIM7
dbase and fserver. Perhaps AIM7 dbase and fserver really suck.
They seem rather impervious to other improvements in the kernel.

> Care to share your aim7 database methodology with me?

AIM7 dbase takes a mixture of AIM9 micro activities and runs
them in proportion to what it's developers found a circa 1996
database running.

My methodology was:

0) Scratch head and look for benchmark that does more than one thing.
1) Stumble on AIM7 which purports to test database, fileserver, compute
server and multiuser scalability.
2) Run AIM7 dbase to crossover
3) Find the lowest load where the Jobs/Minute is near it's peak.
4) Use result of 3) for max. Divide into 8 smaller loads.
5) Test all kernels with the same load.

-- 
Randy Hron
http://home.earthlink.net/~rwhron/kernel/bigbox.html

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