Re: UDP-U stream performance regression on 32-rc1 kernel

["Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>]

On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 18:45 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Zhang, Yanmin <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 11:47 +0800, Alex Shi wrote:
> > > We found the UDP-U 1k/4k stream of netperf benchmark have some
> > > performance regression from 10% to 20% on our Tulsa and some NHM
> > > machines. 
> >  perf events shows function find_busiest_group consumes about 4.5% cpu 
> > time with the patch while it only consumes 0.5% cpu time without the 
> > patch.
> > 
> > The communication between netperf client and netserver is very fast. 
> > When netserver receives a message and there is no new message 
> > available, it goes to sleep and scheduler calls idle_balance => 
> > load_balance_newidle. load_balance_newidle spends too much time and a 
> > new message arrives quickly before load_balance_newidle ends.
> > 
> > As the comments in the patch say hackbench benefits from it, I tested 
> > hackbench on Nehalem and core2 machines. hackbench does benefit from 
> > it, about 6% on nehalem machines, but doesn't benefit on core2 
> > machines.
> 
> Can you confirm that -tip:
> 
>   http://people.redhat.com/mingo/tip.git/README
> 
> has it fixed (or at least improved)?
The latest tips improves netperf loopback result, but doesn't fix it
thoroughly. For example, on a Nehalem machine, netperf UDP-U-1k has
about 25% regression, but with the tips kernel, the regression becomes
less than 10%.

yanmin