Re: Mainline kernel OLTP performance update

On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 16:30 +0800, Zhang, Yanmin wrote:

quoted

I assume binding the client and the server to different physical CPUs
also  means that the SKB is always allocated on CPU 1 and freed on CPU
2? If so, we will be taking the __slab_free() slow path all the time on
kfree() which will cause cache effects, no doubt.

But there's another potential performance hit we're taking because the
object size of the cache is so big. As allocations from CPU 1 keep
coming in, we need to allocate new pages and unfreeze the per-cpu page.
That in turn causes __slab_free() to be more eager to discard the slab
(see the PageSlubFrozen check there).

So before going for cache profiling, I'd really like to see an oprofile
report. I suspect we're still going to see much more page allocator
activity

Theoretically, it should, but oprofile doesn't show that.

quoted

there than with SLAB or SLQB which is why we're still behaving
so badly here.

oprofile output with 2.6.29-rc2-slubrevertlarge:
CPU: Core 2, speed 2666.71 MHz (estimated)
Counted CPU_CLK_UNHALTED events (Clock cycles when not halted) with a unit mask of 0x00 (Unhalted core cycles) count 100000
samples  %        app name                 symbol name
132779   32.9951  vmlinux                  copy_user_generic_string
25334     6.2954  vmlinux                  schedule
21032     5.2264  vmlinux                  tg_shares_up
17175     4.2679  vmlinux                  __skb_recv_datagram
9091      2.2591  vmlinux                  sock_def_readable
8934      2.2201  vmlinux                  mwait_idle
8796      2.1858  vmlinux                  try_to_wake_up
6940      1.7246  vmlinux                  __slab_free

#slaninfo -AD
Name                   Objects    Alloc     Free   %Fast
:0000256                  1643  5215544  5214027  94   0 
kmalloc-8192                28  5189576  5189560   0   0 

                                                    ^^^^^^

This looks bit funny. Hmm.

:0000168                  2631   141466   138976  92  28 
:0004096                  1452    88697    87269  99  96 
:0000192                  3402    63050    59732  89  11 
:0000064                  6265    46611    40721  98  82 
:0000128                  1895    30429    28654  93  32