Call for thread testers

Scott Long scottl at freebsd.org
Wed Aug 27 10:11:22 PDT 2003


Daniel Eischen wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Scott Long wrote:
> 
> 
>>All,
>>
>>This is kind of an unconventional call for help.  As we approach the
>>release of 5.2, we'd really like to show off the performance and
>>stability of our new threading packages.  So, I'm looking for people
>>to volunteer to go out and put some of the thread-capable enterprise
>>and desktop packages to the test.  Packages that I would most like
>>to see are:
>>
>>Apache 2
>>BIND 9
>>OpenOffice
>>Mozilla
>>KDE desktop + Konq
>>Java 1.3/1.4 + Tomcat/etc
>>MySQL
>>Others?
> 
> 
> As to OpenOffice, Mozilla, and KDE/Konqueror, David and I have
> been using them all with libkse with no noticable difference.
> I don't know how you'd judge performance with these, since
> it is more "how it feels".
> 

With the desktop apps I'm mostly looking to collect data on the first
three criteria, and not worry about strict performance benchmarking
(assuming that the 'feel' doesn't go down the toilet).

> You shouldn't use jdk13 with libkse or libthr since it relies
> on the internals of the thread library (libc_r).  It is only useful
> to benchmark jdk14 which, in theory, should work with all our
> native thread libraries.

Yeah, right after I sent the email I remembered the limitation of 1.3.

> 
>>The questions that I would like to have answered are:
>>
>>Does it take advantage of pthreads
>>Does it work with libkse and libthr
>>Does it operate correctly
>>Does it perform better/worse than with libc_r
>>Does it perform better/worse than under FreeBSD 4.x
> 
> 
> One thing I have noticed about Mozilla, is that it does
> create both scope process and scope system threads, which
> was kind of nice to see.
> 
> The ACE library is threaded and includes a set of tests;
> some of which show performance:
> 
>   http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html
> 
> David and I have a couple of other tests which we use to
> measure performance of our threads libraries.
> 

When it comes to performance, it would be interesting to have a report
that says, "Apache2 can serve FOO times more pages per second than
Apache 1".  Same goes for MySQL and others.  We really aren't ready to
benchmark against Linux or 4.x, but it would be very interesting to see
whether libkse and libthr really do give a performance gain on the same
OS and hardware.

Scott



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