polling decreases throughput ~50%

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2005, Victor Semionov wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I've noticed something that seems strange to me and I'd like to ask for an 
>explanation, because I don't think it should be happening.
>
>I was uploading some large file to my neighbor's windows box. With polling 
>disabled, the transfer rate was 8 MB/s and CPU usage was 90%. I turned on 
>polling with sysctl and CPU usage decreased to 50%, which I expected, but 
>also the transfer rate dropped to 4.5 MB/s, about half. The numbers are 
>approximate. The interface is a RealTek (rl driver). No background jobs were 
>running. kern.polling.* all defaults.
>
>Why is that? I thought polling should decrease CPU usage by avoiding too many 
>context switches when a hw irq is generated frequently, but it shouldn't make 
>the transfer slower if there are no other jobs running.

I certainly don't claim to be an expert on this subject so take this with a
grain of salt.

Interrupts were originally created to eliminate the need for polling
allowing processes to sleep until an interrupt occurs rather than having
the process in a loop testing to see if any input is ready or the device is
available for further work.

The only place I've seen polling used effectively on *nix systems is on
parallel printer ports where cheap hardware or printers wouldn't properly
support interrupts.

The other place I've seen polling used was with some brain-dead accounting
software written in Business BASIC that polled the keyboard for input, and
could suck every available cycle -- particularly if the connection to the
session terminated abnormally.

Bill
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