Re: Turn off Hyperthreading! WAS: 60 core performance with 9.3

On 08/20/2014 07:40 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 12:13:50PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> On a read-write test, it's 10% faster with HT off as well.
>>
>> Further, from their production machine we've seen that having HT on
>> causes the machine to slow down by 5X whenever you get more than 40
>> cores (as in 100% of real cores or 50% of HT cores) worth of activity.
>>
>> So we're definitely back to "If you're using PostgreSQL, turn off
>> Hyperthreading".
>
> Not sure how you can make such a blanket statement when so many people
> have tested and shown the benefits of hyper-threading.

Actually, I don't know that anyone has posted the benefits of HT. Link?
I want to compare results so that we can figure out what's different
between my case and theirs. Also, it makes a big difference if there is
an advantage to turning HT on for some workloads.

> I am also
> unclear exactly what you tested, as I didn't see it mentioned in the
> email --- CPU type, CPU count, and operating system would be the minimal
> information required.

Ooops! I thought I'd posted that earlier, but I didn't.

The processors in question is the Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7- 4850, with 4
of them for a total of 40 cores or 80 HT cores.

OS is RHEL with 2.6.32-431.3.1.el6.x86_64.

I've emailed a kernel hacker who works at Intel for comment; for one
thing, I'm wondering if the older kernel version is a problem for a
system like this.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com