Re: Problem with Asus P4C800-DX and P4 -Northwood-

[Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org>]

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 02:50:05AM +0200, Andreas Baer wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> First I want to say sorry for this BIG post, but it seems that I have no 
> other chance. :)

It's not big enough, you did not explain us what your database does nor
how it does work, what type of resource it consumes most, any vmstat
capture during operation. There are so many possibilities here :
  - poor optimisation from gcc => CPU bound

  - many random disk accesses => I/O bound, but changing/tuning the I/O
    scheduler could help

  - intensive disk reads => perhaps your windows and linux partitions are
    on the same disk and windows is the first one, then you have 50 MB/s
    on the windows one and 25 MB/s on the linux one ?

  - task scheduling : if your application is multi-process/multi-thread,
    it is possible that you hit some corner cases. 

So please start "vmstat 1" before your 3min request, and stop it at the
end, so that it covers all the work. It will tell us many more useful
information.

Regards,
Willy

> I have a Asus P4C800-DX with a P4 2,4 GHz 512 KB L2 Cache "Northwood" 
> Processor (lowest Processor that supports HyperThreading) and 1GB DDR400 
> RAM. I'm also running S-ATA disks with about 50 MB/s (just to show that 
> it shouldn't be due to hard disk speed). Everything was bought back in 
> 2003 and I recently upgraded to the lastest BIOS Version. I've installed 
> Gentoo Linux and WinXP with dual-boot on this system.
> 
> Now to my problem:
> 
> I'm currently developing a little database in C++ (runs currently under 
> Windows and Linux) that internally builds up an R-Tree and does a lot of 
> equality tests and other time consuming checks. For perfomance issue I 
> ran a test with 200000 entries and it took me about 3 minutes to 
> complete under Gentoo Linux.
> 
> So I ran the same test in Windows on the same platform and it took about 
> 30(!) seconds. I was a little bit surprised about this result so I 
> started to run several tests on different machines like an Athlon XP 
> 2000+ platform and on my P4 3GHz "Prescott" Notebook and they all showed 
> something about 30 seconds or below. Then I began to search for errors 
> or any misconfiguration in Gentoo, in my code and also for people that 
> have made equal experiences with that hardware configuration on the 
> internet. I thought I have a problem with a broken gcc or libraries like 
> glibc or libstdc++ and so I recompiled my whole system with the stable 
> gcc 3.3.5 release, but that didn't make any changes. I also tried an 
> Ubuntu and a Suse LiveCD to verify that it has nothing to do with Gentoo 
> and my kernel version and they had the same problem and ran the test in 
> about 3 min.
> 
> Currently I'm at a loss what to do. I'm beginning to think that this is 
> maybe a kernel problem because I have no problems under Windows and it 
> doesn't matter whether I change any software or any configuration in 
> Gentoo. I'm currently running kernel-2.6.12, but the Livecd's had other 
> kernels.
> 
> HyperThreading(HT) is also not the reason for the loss of power, because 
> I tried to disable it and to create a uniprocessor kernel, but that 
> didn't solve the problem.
> 
> If you need some output of my configuration/log files or anything like 
> that, just mail me.
> 
> Is it possible that the kernel has a lack of support for P4 with 
> "Northwood" core? Maybe only this one? Could I solve the problem if I 
> change the processor to a "Prescott" core? Perhaps someone could provide 
> any information if this would make any sense or not.
> 
> Thanks in advance for anything that could help.
> 
> ...sorry for bad english :)
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