Linux: the next step
A message that is not in the archive (sent off-list or not yet received): renglish@ratliff
Quoted 7 lines · Bob English
If you look at larry's context switch and pipe benchmarks, you'll see that they run much faster on a single CPU than on two or more. A lot of the difference is due to fine-grained locking, which causes more dirty cache lines to thrash than is actually necessary for the operations involved. Pipe communication takes locks at the vnode and inode level. Context switches take locks on threads, accounting structures, and queues.
If I look at those benchmarks, they'll probably run faster on Linux on an Indy than they do on IRIX on an Indy, so I doubt the locking is the big problem we need to be looking at. I don't have numbers from David to quote, so maybe I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong.
-- Steve
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Quoted 4 lines
If I look at those benchmarks, they'll probably run faster on Linux on an Indy than they do on IRIX on an Indy, so I doubt the locking is the big problem we need to be looking at. I don't have numbers from David to quote, so maybe I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong.
I was comparing Irix MP times vs. Irix UP times, and the difference is both substantial and locking related. Of course, if Irix were as efficient on a UP as Linux, the difference might be a factor of 10 rather than a factor of 2 :-).
--bob--