Taking Linux 2.6.23-rc6 + 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 as a basis, I took some sample
runs of the following on both it and after applying Mathieu Desnoyers
11-patch sequence (19 September 2007).
* 32-way IA64 + 132GiB + 10 FC adapters + 10 HP MSA 1000s (one 72GiB
volume per MSA used)
* 10 runs with each configuration, averages shown below
o 2.6.23-rc6 + 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 without blktrace running
o 2.6.23-rc6 + 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 with blktrace running
o 2.6.23-rc6 + 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 + markers without blktrace running
o 2.6.23-rc6 + 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 + markers with blktrace running
* A run consists of doing the following in parallel:
o Make an ext3 FS on each of the 10 volumes
o Mount & unmount each volume
+ The unmounting generates a tremendous amount of writes
to the disks - thus stressing the intended storage
devices (10 volumes) plus the separate volume for all
the blktrace data (when blk tracing is enabled).
+ Note the times reported below only cover the
make/mount/unmount time - the actual blktrace runs
extended beyond the times measured (took quite a while
for the blk trace data to be output). We're only
concerned with the impact on the "application"
performance in this instance.
Results are:
Kernel w/out BT STDDEV w/ BT STDDEV
------------------------------------- --------- ------ --------- ------
2.6.23-rc6 + 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 14.679982 0.34 27.754796 2.09
2.6.23-rc6 + 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 + markers 14.993041 0.59 26.694993 3.23
It looks to be about 2.1% increase in time to do the make/mount/unmount
operations with the marker patches in place and no blktrace operations.
With the blktrace operations in place we see about a 3.8% decrease in
time to do the same ops.
When our Oracle benchmarking machine frees up, and when the
marker/blktrace patches are more stable, we'll try to get some "real"
Oracle benchmark runs done to gage the impact of the markers changes to
performance...
Alan D. Brunelle
Hewlett-Packard / Open Source and Linux Organization / Scalability and
Performance Group
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