Re: VM Report was:Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps

Mike Galbraith
2001-06-09T05:07:00Z

On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, John Stoffel wrote:
>
> > More importantly, a *repeatable* set of tests is what is needed to
> > test the VM and get consistent results from run to run, so you can see
> > how your changes are impacting performance. The kernel compile
> > doesn't really have any one process grow to a large fraction of
> > memory, so dropping in a compile which *does* is a good thing.
>
> I agree with you.
>
> Mike, I'm sure you have noticed that stock kernel gives much better
> results than mine or Jonathan's patch.

I noticed that Jonathan brought back waiting.. that (among others)
made me veeeeery interested.

> Now the stock kernel gives us crappy interactivity compared to my patch.
> (Note: my patch still does not gives me the interactivity I want under
> high VM loads, but I hope to get there soon).

(And that's why) Among other things (yes, I do love throughput) I've
poked at the interactivity problem. I can't improve it anymore without
doing some strategic waiting :( I used to be able to help it a little
by doing a careful roll-up in scrub size as load builds.. trying to
smooth the transition from latency oriented to hammer down throughput.

> BTW, we are talking with the OSDL (http://www.osdlab.org) guys about a
> possibility to setup a test system which would run a different variety of
> benchmarks to give us results of different kinds of workloads. If that
> ever happens, we'll probably get rid of most of this testing problems.

Excellent!

-Mike