linux-kernel - Re: SMP performance degradation with sysbench

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Message-ID: <29495f1d0702271240p1f446a74me9623ae756c67eb5@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:40:45 -0800
From:	"Nish Aravamudan" <nish.aravamudan@...il.com>
To:	"Paulo Marques" <pmarques@...popie.com>
Cc:	"Rik van Riel" <riel@...hat.com>,
	"\"J.A. Magallón\"" <jamagallon@....com>,
	"Hiro Yoshioka" <hyoshiok@...aclelinux.com>, davej@...hat.com,
	harlan@...select.com, nickpiggin@...oo.com.au,
	l_allegrucci@...oo.it, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, mingo@...e.hu,
	suparna@...ibm.com, jens.axboe@...cle.com
Subject: Re: SMP performance degradation with sysbench

On 2/27/07, Paulo Marques <pmarques@...popie.com> wrote:
> Rik van Riel wrote:
> > J.A. Magallón wrote:
> >>[...]
> >> Its the same to answer 4+4 queries than 8 at half the speed, isn't it ?
> >
> > That still doesn't fix the potential Linux problem that this
> > benchmark identified.
> >
> > To clarify: I don't care as much about MySQL performance as
> > I care about identifying and fixing this potential bug in
> > Linux.
>
> IIRC a long time ago there was a change in the scheduler to prevent a
> low prio task running on a sibling of a hyperthreaded processor to slow
> down a higher prio task on another sibling of the same processor.
>
> Basically the scheduler would put the low prio task to sleep during an
> adequate task slice to allow the other sibling to run at full speed for
> a while.
>
> I don't know the scheduler code well enough, but comments like this one
> make me think that the change is still in place:

<snip>

> If that is the case, turning off CONFIG_SCHED_SMT would solve the problem.

To chime in here, I was attempting to reproduce this on an 8-way Xeon
box (4 dual-core). SCHED_SMT and SCHED_MC on led to scaling issues
when above 4 threads (4 threads was the peak). To the point, where I
couldn't break 1000 transactions per second. Turning both off (with
2.6.20.1) gives much better performance through 16 threads. I am now
running for the cases from 17 to 32 to see if I can reproduce the
problem at hand. I'll regenerate my data and post numbers soon.

I don't know if anyone else has those on in their kernel .config, but
I'd suggest turning them off, as Paulo said.

Thanks,
Nish
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