Danial Thom wrote:
--- Jesper Juhl <[email protected]> wrote:
On 8/21/05, Danial Thom <[email protected]>
wrote:
I just started fiddling with 2.6.12, and
there
seems to be a big drop-off in performance
from
2.4.x in terms of networking on a
uniprocessor
system. Just bridging packets through the
machine, 2.6.12 starts dropping packets at
~100Kpps, whereas 2.4.x doesn't start
dropping
until over 350Kpps on the same hardware
(2.0Ghz
Opteron with e1000 driver). This is pitiful
prformance for this hardware. I've
increased the rx ring in the e1000 driver to
512
with little change (interrupt moderation is
set
to 8000 Ints/second). Has "tuning" for MP
destroyed UP performance altogether, or is
there
some tuning parameter that could make a
4-fold
difference? All debugging is off and there
are
no messages on the console or in the error
logs.
The kernel is the standard kernel.org dowload
config with SMP turned off and the intel
ethernet
card drivers as modules without any other
changes, which is exactly the config for my
2.4
kernels.
If you have preemtion enabled you could disable
it. Low latency comes
at the cost of decreased throughput - can't
have both. Also try using
a HZ of 100 if you are currently using 1000,
that should also improve
throughput a little at the cost of slightly
higher latencies.
I doubt that it'll do any huge difference, but
if it does, then that
would probably be valuable info.
Ok, well you'll have to explain this one:
"Low latency comes at the cost of decreased
throughput - can't have both"
Configuring "preempt" gives lower latency, because then
almost anything can be interrupted (preempted). You can then
get very quick responses to some things, i.e. interrupts and such.
The cost comes, because _something_ was interrupted, something
that instead would run to completion first in a kernel made without
"preempt".
So that other thing, whatever it is, got slower.
And the problem is bigger than merely "things happens in a different order".
Switching the cpu from one job to another have a big overhead.
Particularly,
the cpu caches have to be refilled more often, which takes time.
Running one
big job to completion fills the cache with that job's data _once_. If
the job
is preempted a couple of times you have to bring it into cache three
times instead, and that will cost you, performance wise.
This is not _necessarily_ your problem, but trying a 2.6 kernel without
preempt
and with hz=100 (both things configurable through normal kernel
configuration)
will clearly show if this is the problem in your case. If you're lucky,
this is all
you need to get your performance back. If not, then at least it is an
important datapoint for those trying to figure it out. Nobody here want
2.6 to have 1/4 of the performance of 2.4!
Helge Hafting
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