Re: [PATCH] concurrent block allocation for ext2 against 2.5.64

William Lee Irwin III (wli@holomorphy.com)
Fri, 14 Mar 2003 23:05:11 -0800


William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
>> Looks like dbench doesn't scale. It needs to learn how to spread itself
>> across disks if it's not to saturate a device queue while at the same
>> time generating enough cpu load to saturate cpus.

On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 10:44:13PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Nope. What we're trying to measure here is pure in-memory lock contention,
> locked bus traffic, context switches, etc, etc. To do that we need to get
> the IO system out of the picture.
> One way to do that is to increase /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio and
> dirty_background_ratio to 70% or so. You can still hit IO wait if someone
> tries to truncate a file which pdflush is writing out, so increase
> dirty_expire_centisecs and dirty_writeback_centisecs to 1000000000 or so...
> Then, on the second run, when all the required metadata blocks are in
> pagecache you should be able to get an IO-free run.

Oh, sorry, I did increase dirty_ratio and dirty_background_ratio to 99,
I forgot about dirty_writeback_centisecs though, I'll re-run with that.

William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
>> Is there a better (publicable/open/whatever) benchmark?

On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 10:44:13PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> I have lots of little testlets which can be mixed and matched. RAM-only
> dbench will do for the while. It is showing things.
>

William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
>> dbench 128:
>> Throughput 161.237 MB/sec 128 procs
>> dbench 128 2>& 1 143.85s user 3311.10s system 1219% cpu 4:43.27 total
>> vma samples %-age symbol name
>> c0106ff4 9134179 33.7261 default_idle
>> c01dc3b0 5570229 20.5669 __copy_to_user_ll
>> c01dc418 1773600 6.54865 __copy_from_user_ll
>> c0119058 731524 2.701 try_to_wake_up
>> c0108140 686952 2.53643 .text.lock.semaphore
>> c011a1bc 489415 1.80706 schedule
>> c0119dac 485196 1.79149 scheduler_tick
>> c011fadc 448048 1.65433 profile_hook
>> c0119860 356065 1.3147 load_balance
>> c0107d0c 267333 0.987072 __down
>> c011c4ff 249627 0.921696 .text.lock.sched

On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 10:44:13PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> The wakeup and .text.lock.semaphore load indicates that there is a lot
> of contention for a semaphore somewhere. Still.
> I'm not sure which one. It shouldn't be a directory semaphore. Might be
> lock_super() in the inode allocator, but that seems unlikely.

I'm going to have to break out tools to decipher which one this is.
hlinder forward-ported lockmeter so I'll throw that in the mix.

-- wli
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/