lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2008]   [Jul]   [17]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
SubjectRe: Large increase in context switch rate
From
Date
On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 11:54 -0700, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Hi Ingo,
>
> We have Alex Nixon doing some profiling of Xen kernels, comparing
> current pvops Xen and native with the last "official" Xen kernel
> 2.6.18.8-xen.
>
> One obvious difference is that the kernbench context switch rate is way
> up, from about 30k to 110k. Also, the user time went up from about 375s
> to 390s - and that's comparing pvops native to 2.6.18.8-xen (pvops Xen
> was more or less identical).
>
> I wonder if the user time increase is related to the context switch
> rate, because the actual context switch time itself is accounted to the
> process, or because of secondary things like cache and tlb misses. Or
> perhaps the new scheduler accounts for things differently?
>
> Anyway, I'm wondering:
>
> * is the increased context switch rate expected?
> * what tunables are there so we can try and make them have
> comparable context switch rates?
>
> This is an issue because the Xen/pvops kernel is showing a fairly large
> overall performance regression, and the context switches a specifically
> slow compared to the old Xen kernel, and the high switch rate is
> presumably compounding the problem. It would be nice to have some knobs
> to turn to see what the underlying performance characteristics are.

Is this specific to Xen?, as a native kernel doesn't do more than ~3k
cs/s with make -j3 on my dual core.





\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2008-07-17 11:19    [W:0.061 / U:0.896 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site