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Re: Performance Tracker project update

Previous thread: network performance by Stefan Lambrev on Monday, January 21, 2008 - 2:39 pm. (31 messages)

Next thread: Re: Performance Tracker project update by Robert Watson on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 3:36 pm. (20 messages)
To: Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 7:44 am

This is coming along very nicely indeed!

One suggestion I have is that as more metrics are added it becomes 
important for an "at a glance" overview of changes so we can monitor for 
performance improvements and regressions among many workloads.

One way to do this would be a matrix of each metric with its change 
compared to recent samples.  e.g. you could do a student's T comparison 
of today's numbers with those from yesterday, or from a week ago, and 
colour-code those that show a significant deviation from "no change". 
This might be a bit noisy on short timescales, so you could aggregrate 
data into larger bins and compare e.g. moving 1-week aggregates. 
Fluctuations on short timescales won't stand out, but if there is a real 
change then it will show up less than a week later.

These significant events could also be graphed themselves and/or a 
history log maintained (or automatically annotated on the individual 
graphs) so historical changes can also be pinpointed.

At some point the ability to annotate the data will become important 
(e.g. "We understand the cause of this, it was r1.123 of foo.c, which 
was corrected in r1.124.  The developer responsible has been shot.")

Kris

P.S. If I understand correctly, the float test shows a regression?  The 
metric is calculations/second, so higher = better?
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To: Michelle Li <michelle_li_001@...>, <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Sunday, December 21, 2008 - 12:50 pm

Michelle,

just found this in the mail.  However, it looks like the VPN to work is down.  I can't get to the machine right now.  I'll mail on Monday.

P.




________________________________
From: Michelle Li &lt;michelle_li_001@yahoo.com&gt;
To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org
Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2008 7:25:02 PM
Subject: Re: ZFS, NFS and Network tuning (Paul Patterson) 

...and the dmesg?

please post

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: ZFS, NFS and Network tuning (Paul Patterson)
   2. Re: ZFS, NFS and Network tuning (Paul Patterson)
   3. Re: ZFS, NFS and Network tuning (Paul Patterson)
   4. intel i7 and Hyperthreading (Mike Tancsa)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:47:59 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Patterson 

Subject: Re: ZFS, NFS and Network tuning
To: Paul Patterson 
,
freebsd-performance@freebsd.org
Message-ID: &lt;15723.22980.qm@web110511.mail.gq1.yahoo.com&gt;
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Hi,

as promised, the parameter tuning I have on the box (does anyone see anything wrong?)

/boot/loader.conf

kern.hz="100"
vm.kmem_size_max="1536M"
vm.kmem_size="1536M"
vfs.zfs.prefetch_disble=1

/etc/sysctl.conf

kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16777216
kern.ipc.nmbclusters=32768
kern.ipc.somaxconn=8192
kern.maxfiles=65536
kern.maxfilesperproc=32768
kern.mxvnodes=600000
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
net.inet.tcp.infli...
To: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>
Cc: <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 4:53 am

And now for some publicity :)

I am a big fan of Orca (www.orcaware.com) which I have used regularly  
with Solaris *and*
FreeBSD. I wrote a performance data collector for FreeBSD, actually.

The advantage of Orca is that it gets simple text files with the  
performance data
and then it generates graphs and web pages periodically, keeping the  
data in RRD
databases. I think Orca would be really useful for this project.

And of course, if anyone wants to give "Devilator" a try, it currently  
graphs
CPU usage in system, interrupt, user time, disk I/O bandwidth, memory  
usage,
system and SWI CPU usage, process sleeping reasons... So far it's been  
really
helpful for me in order to identify bottlenecks.

Regards,






Borja.

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To: <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 8:16 pm

I have a suggestion to make the graphs more readable: if a long period=20
was chosen by the user (e.g. &gt; 100 days / plot points), don't plot=20
points and error bars, plot a simple line through the points. Also, set=20
all date strings on the X-axis to empty strings except for the dates on=20
1/10ths of the interval.

Did you remove WITNESS,INVARIANTS and malloc debugging for the benchmarks=
?
To: Ivan Voras <ivoras@...>
Cc: <performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 6:28 am

The kernel configuration file has:
include GENERIC
PERFMON	nomakeoptions	DEBUG
PERFMON	nooptions	INVARIANTS
PERFMON	nooptions	GDB
PERFMON	nooptions	DDB
PERFMON	nooptions	KDB
PERFMON	nooptions	WITNESS
PERFMON	nooptions	WITNESS_SKIPSPIN
PERFMON	nooptions	INVARIANT_SUPPORT

I also ship the images with a GENERIC kernel in case debugging is needed.

I haven't touched malloc.conf but realize that I should. What's the 
official recommendation on malloc settings?

Erik
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To: <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 7:05 am

You'd have to patch /usr/src/lib/libc/stdlib/malloc.c and define
MALLOC_PRODUCTION. Yes, it's not elegant.
To: Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Cc: <performance@...>, Ivan Voras <ivoras@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 7:06 am

Actually the error bars are quite important to see what is going on. 
Some of the metrics are very (too) noisy and if you only look at the 
data points they sometimes appear to have a signal when they don't. 
Ultimately that just means more data points should be taken per run for 

For benchmarking you should enable MALLOC_PRODUCTION in 
src/lib/libc/stdlib/malloc.c.  Anyway, for now I am not worried about 
the particular benchmarks you are running, because they are just 
demonstrators for the framework and we can easily go back and add more 
in later on.

Kris
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To: <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 7:15 am

Of course they are useful, but do we really need to see them when there
are hundreds of samples plotted 1 pixel apart? (As I've said: keep them
when when the user "zooms in" on an appropriate small number of
samples). But this is an aesthetics-oriented idea, functionality won't
be impaired either way so feel free to ignore it.
To: Ivan Voras <ivoras@...>
Cc: <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 7:26 am

I think so, yeah.  Otherwise I'd waste time zooming in only to find the 
trends are measurement noise.

Kris

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To: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>
Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 9:49 am

I agree that there's a need for an overview and some sort of 
notification. I've been collecting historical data to get a baseline for 

There's a field in the database for this sort of thing. I just think it 

The documentation on Unixbench is scarce, but I would think so.

BTW if anyone's interested my SVN repo is online at:

svn://littlebit.dk/website/trunk    (Pylons project)
svn://littlebit.dk/tracker/trunk    (sh/Python scripts for runnning the 
server and slaves)

Be careful with your eyes - this is my first attempt at both shell 
scripting and Python :-)

Erik
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To: Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>, freebsd-performance@freebsd.org <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Friday, February 1, 2008 - 1:55 am

At Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:49:14 +0100,

BTW This is excellent work and, if I get the time, I'll be using some
of this at my day job.

Thanks,
George
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To: Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>, freebsd-performance@freebsd.org <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 3:40 pm

Sounds great -- it would be nice to be able to have a few annotations such as 
"RELENG_7 branchpoint", "7.0 release", that could then appear as vertical 
lines in the graphs, and likewise things like "netisr made default", "libthr 
becomes default".

Finally, in the interests of making your life more complicated, it would be 
neat to graph performance across a set of FreeBSD branches overlaid or 
vertically offset so you could monitor, say, MySQL performance on 8-CURRENT, 
7-STABLE, and 6-STABLE over time.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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To: Robert Watson <rwatson@...>
Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>, freebsd-performance@freebsd.org <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 4:59 pm

I'd like to do that, but I'm a bit afraid of hitting the webserver too 
hard. Data is changing constantly, so graphs are created on the fly. I 
could probably cache some small versions though and put them on an 


It's supported by the tools, database and website but currently I just 
have 2 (slow) machines to work with at the university. The server is 
churning out images for the slave to consume every 2 hours which is an 
acceptable sample rate if the intent is to monitor CURRENT development 
and provide performance alerts much like the tinderboxes do now. Adding 
releases would seriously hurt that rate.

My focus has been strictly on comparing CVS versions because trying to 
cover anything else quickly makes the configuration space explode and 
the sample rate go down the drain. Lots of interesting comparisons could 
be made, however, provided sufficient hardware supplies. Comparing 
branches would on the top of the list.

Erik
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To: Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>, Robert Watson <rwatson@...>, freebsd-performance@freebsd.org <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 3:58 am

Quoting Erik Cederstrand &lt;erik@cederstrand.dk&gt; (from Wed, 23 Jan 2008  

In case you have some space left for more machines, maybe someone is  
willing to help out by sponsoring some. Just tell us how many machines  
you can handle (space/power/...) and if you are interested that we put  
it up on our wantlist.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137
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To: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@...>
Cc: <performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 6:02 am

I'm sharing an office with 4 others and I'm leaving for Real Work in a 
month, so I'm not really in a position to expand at the moment. However, 
I'd like to do so later on, and also get a more permanent and reliable 
location for the machines.

After weeding out the worst bugs the system runs pretty much by itself, 
but since this is CURRENT there's always the possibility of the slaves 
needing attention.

Erik
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To: Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Cc: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@...>, <performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 7:08 am

I don't see machine availability being a problem once we are ready to 
"take this live".

Kris

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To: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>
Cc: <performance@...>, Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 7:43 am

Quoting Kris Kennaway &lt;kris@FreeBSD.org&gt; (from Thu, 24 Jan 2008  

Me too, but it's in the development stage and Robert asks for some new  
features, and I've read the answer in a way that I thought that it  
would be good to have 2-3 more machines available for development.

Erik, would some more machines be helpful for development?

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
Lie, n.:
	A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one
	discovered to date.

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137
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To: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@...>
Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>, <performance@...>
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008 - 8:14 am

As Kris noted elsewhere I'm still just demonstrating the framework, and 
the hardware I have available for this is sufficient. When the framework 
goes live, more computing power is probably necessary.

Erik
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To: Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org <freebsd-performance@...>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 3:11 pm

Interesting.  Some candidate changes from 2007-10-02:

   Modified files:
     contrib/gcc          opts.c
   Log:
   Do not imply -ftree-vrp with -O2 and above.  One must implicitly specify
   '-ftree-vrp' if one wants it.
   Some bad code generation has been tracked to -ftree-vrp.  jdk1{5,6} are
   notable examples.

     sys/kern             sched_ule.c
   Log:
    - Move the rebalancer back into hardclock to prevent potential softclock
      starvation caused by unbalanced interrupt loads.
    - Change the rebalancer to work on stathz ticks but retain 
randomization.
    - Simplify locking in tdq_idled() to use the tdq_lock_pair() rather than
      complex sequences of locks to avoid deadlock.


     sys/kern             sched_ule.c
   Log:
    - Reassign the thread queue lock to newtd prior to switching.  Assigning
      after the switch leads to a race where the outgoing thread still owns
      the local queue lock while another cpu may switch it in.  This race
      is only possible on machines where cpu_switch can take significantly
      longer on different cpus which in practice means HTT machines with
      unfair thread scheduling algorithms.


Kris
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To: Kris Kennaway <kris@...>
Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org <freebsd-performance@...>, Erik Cederstrand <erik@...>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 9:58 pm

OK, so it was this one.  The other interesting events seem to be:

2007-10-20: drop in super-smack performance and context switch 
benchmarks.  This is due to the switch from SCHED_4BSD to SCHED_ULE 
(super-smack is largely a context switch benchmark due to retarded 
design).  There are uncommitted patches that reduce ULE context switch 
overhead though, so it will be interesting to see how they affect this.

2007-12-30: file read/pipe read/pipe ping-pong/syscall overhead 
performance increases.  This is due to Jeff's lockless struct file 
changes (syscall overhead is only affected because unixbench uses the 
dup2() syscall which is not in fact just a measure of syscall overhead 
but now has reduced non-syscall cost).

Kris
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Previous thread: network performance by Stefan Lambrev on Monday, January 21, 2008 - 2:39 pm. (31 messages)

Next thread: Re: Performance Tracker project update by Robert Watson on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 3:36 pm. (20 messages)
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