Progress on scaling of FreeBSD on 8 CPU systems

Robert Watson rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Sun Feb 25 13:51:34 UTC 2007


On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, Martin Blapp wrote:

>> It would be really great if we could find "workload owners" who would 
>> maintain easy-to-run benchmark configurations and also run them regularly 
>> on a fixed hardware configuration over a long time publishing results and 
>> testing patches.  Kris has done this for SQL benchmarks to great effect,
>
> I'm interested in such a workload test. At my job we run various other 
> servers which have a classic virus/antispam environment. And unfortunatly 
> clamd behaves not very well on FreeBSD (see mails to freebsd-threads), and 
> this happens even on 2-CPU systems.
>
> I think its not very difficult to make a scripted load test, with 
> 2/4/6/8/16/32 scans in parallel, with ULE or BSD scheduler.

As long as it is realistic and reproduceable, it sounds good to me.

> Btw: what is the best method to profile a threaded application to see where 
> it spends the most CPU time ?

Try looking at system pmc support -- using system pmcs, you can profile a 
variety of factors (including CPU use, cache misses, etc) across the whole 
system (kernel and application), so it's a really neat tool.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge


More information about the freebsd-hackers mailing list