SOLVED: processor running queue - general rule of thumb?

Sorry, just in case anyone is filtering on that in the subject line ...

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Alan McKay<alan(dot)mckay(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> BTW, our designer got the nytprofile or whatever it is called for Perl
> and found out that it was a problem with the POE library that was
> being used as a state-machine to drive the whole load suite.   It was
> taking something like 95% of the CPU time!
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Alan McKay<alan(dot)mckay(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Hey folks,
>>
>> I'm new to all this stuff, and am sitting here with kSar looking at
>> some graphed results of some load tests we did, trying to figure
>> things out :-)
>>
>> We got some unsatisfactory results in stressing our system, and now I
>> have to divine where the bottleneck is.
>>
>> We did 4 tests, upping the load each time.   The 3rd and 4th ones have
>> all 8 cores pegged at about 95%.  Yikes!
>>
>> In the first test the processor running queue spikes at 7 and maybe
>> averages 4 or 5
>>
>> In the last test it spikes at 33 with an average maybe 25.
>>
>> Looks to me like it could be a CPU bottleneck.  But I'm new at this :-)
>>
>> Is there a general rule of thumb "if queue is longer than X, it is
>> likely a bottleneck?"
>>
>> In reading an IBM Redbook on Linux performance, I also see this :
>> "High numbers of context switches in connection with a large number of
>> interrupts can signal driver or application issues."
>>
>> On my first test where the CPU is not pegged, context switching goes
>> from about 3700 to about 4900, maybe averaging 4100
>>
>> On the pegged test, the values are maybe 10% higher than that, maybe 15%.
>>
>> It is an IBM 3550 with 8 cores, 2660.134 MHz (from dmesg), 32Gigs RAM
>>
>> thanks,
>> -Alan
>>
>> --
>> “Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
>>         - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"
>>
>
>
>
> --
> “Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
>         - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"
>

--
“Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
- Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"