Re: Excessive context switching on SMP Xeons

From: Dave Cramer <pg(at)fastcrypt(dot)com>
To: Bill Montgomery <billm(at)lulu(dot)com>
Cc: Michael Adler <adler(at)pobox(dot)com>, perform <pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Excessive context switching on SMP Xeons
Date: 2004-10-14 19:59:14
Message-ID: 1097783954.7978.501.camel@localhost.localdomain
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Bill,

In order to manifest the context switch problem you will definitely
require clients to be set to more than one in pgbench. It only occurs
when 2 or more backends need access to shared memory.

If you want help backpatching Gavin's patch I'll be glad to do it for
you, but you do need a recent kernel.

Dave

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 14:48, Bill Montgomery wrote:
> Michael Adler wrote:
>
> >On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 11:48:41AM -0400, Bill Montgomery wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Alan Stange wrote:
> >>
> >>The same test on a Dell PowerEdge 1750, Dual Xeon 3.2 GHz, 512k cache,
> >>HT on, Linux 2.4.21-20.ELsmp (RHEL 3), 4GB memory, pg 7.4.5:
> >>
> >>Far less performance that the Dual Opterons with a low number of
> >>clients, but the gap narrows as the number of clients goes up. Anyone
> >>smarter than me care to explain?
> >>
> >>
> >
> >You'll have to wait for someone smarter than you, but I will posit
> >this: Did you use a tmpfs filesystem like Alan? You didn't mention
> >either way. Alan did that as an attempt remove IO as a variable.
> >
> >-Mike
> >
> >
>
> Yes, I should have been more explicit. My goal was to replicate his
> experiment as closely as possible in my environment, so I did run my
> postgres data directory on a tmpfs.
>
> -Bill Montgomery
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
--
Dave Cramer
519 939 0336
ICQ # 14675561
www.postgresintl.com

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