Re: Poor PostgreSQL scaling on Linux 2.6.25-rc5 (vs 2.6.22)

Nicholas Miell
2008-03-11T23:12:25Z

On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 22:34 +0100, Cyrus Massoumi wrote:
> Nicholas Miell wrote:
>
> > (Also, ignoring MySQL because it's a terrible piece of software at least
> > when regarding it's scalability is a bad idea. It's the M in LAMP, it
> > has a huge user base, and FreeBSD manages to outperform Linux with the
> > same unscalable piece of software.)
>
> Did you actually see this?
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/npiggin/sysbench/
>
> FreeBSD does not outperform Linux, it's actually a bit faster according
> to Nick's tests.

I am aware of those results, but in the mail I was responding to, Nick
Piggin said the following:

> The problem with MySQL contention means that if the scheduler
> unluckily chooses to deschedule a lock holder, then you can get
> idle time building up on other cores and you can get context switch
> cascades as things all pile up onto this heavily contended lock. As
> such, it means MySQL is not an ideal candidate for looking at
> performance behaviour. I discounted the relatively worse scaling of
> MySQL with 2.6.25-rc (than 2.6.22) as such an effect.

which I interpreted to mean that MySQL performs worse on 2.6.23+ than on
2.6.22 but for some reason this doesn't matter.

--
Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>