Re: all syscalls initially taking 4usec on a P4? Re: nonblocking UDPv4 recvfrom() taking 4usec @ 3GHz?

Benjamin LaHaise
2007-02-20T19:40:44Z

On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 08:33:20PM +0100, bert hubert wrote:
> I'm investigating this further for other system calls. It might be that my
> measurements are off, but it appears even a slight delay between calls
> incurs a large penalty.

Make sure your system is idle. Userspace bloat means that *lots* of idle
activity occurs in between timer ticks on recent distributions -- all those
widgets polling the hardware to see if something changed or needs updating
do a lot of damage to the caches. Try comparing a run under init=/bin/bash
with one while logged in to a desktop environment to see just how painful it
is.

-ben
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