2 x quad-core system is slower that 2 x dual core on FreeBSD

[Kris Kennaway]

Alexey Popov wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>>> In the meantime there is unfortunately not a lot that can be done, 
>>>> AFAICT.  There is one hack that I will send you later but it is not 
>>>> likely to help much.  I will also think about how to track down the 
>>>> cause of the contention further (the profiling trace only shows that 
>>>> it comes mostly from vget/vput but doesn't show where these are 
>>>> called from).
>>>
>>> Actually this patch might help.  It doesn't replace lockmgr but it 
>>> does fix a silly thundering herd behaviour.  It probably needs some 
>>> adjustment to get it to apply cleanly (it is about 7 months old), and 
>>> I apparently stopped using it because I ran into deadlocks.  It might 
>>> be stable enough to at least see how much it helps.
>> Try this one instead, it applies to HEAD.  You'll need to manually 
>> enter the paths though because of how p4 mangles diffs.
> Finally I tried your patch and it seems to help a little.
> 
> Now FreeBSD 7-STABLE ULE 8-core server without optimized PHP 
> realpath_cache_size (producing 2000+ lstats per request) can handle up 
> to ~24 rps as opposed to  max. 17 rps without your patch. %sys never 
> grows over %user with your patch. On the server with optimized 
> realpath_cache_size there's no visible influence of your patch.

You said "20" before for this configuration, so I'm a bit suspicious 
about how seriously to treat your measurements :)

Anyway, please obtain another lock profiling trace using the same 
conditions as the previous one (same workload & duration, etc), so we 
can compare what changed.

Kris