Re: [tbench regression fixes]: digging out smelly deadmen.

Jiri Kosina
2008-10-27T10:43:06Z

On Sun, 26 Oct 2008, Jiri Kosina wrote:

> > > > > 208.4 MB/sec -- vanilla 2.6.16.60
> > > > > 201.6 MB/sec -- vanilla 2.6.20.1
> > > > > 172.9 MB/sec -- vanilla 2.6.22.19
> > > > > 74.2 MB/sec -- vanilla 2.6.23
> > > > > 46.1 MB/sec -- vanilla 2.6.24.2
> > > > > 30.6 MB/sec -- vanilla 2.6.26.1
> > > > > I.e. huge drop for 2.6.23 (this was with default configs for each
> > > > > respective kernel).
> > Was this when we decreased the default value of
> > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio, perhaps? dbench is sensitive to that.
> 2.6.28 gives 41.8 MB/s with /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio == 50. So small
> improvement, but still far far away from the throughput of pre-2.6.23
> kernels.

Ok, so another important datapoint:

with c1e4fe711a4 (just before CFS has been merged for 2.6.23), the dbench
throughput measures

187.7 MB/s

in our testing conditions (default config).

With c31f2e8a42c4 (just after CFS has been merged for 2.6.23), the
throughput measured by dbench is

82.3 MB/s

This is the huge drop we have been looking for. After this, the
performance was still going down gradually, up to ~45 MS/ we are measuring
for 2.6.27. But the biggest drop (more than 50%) points directly to CFS
merge.

--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs