Re: [patch] Real-Time Preemption, -RT-2.6.9-mm1-V0

From: K.R. Foley
Date: Wed Oct 27 2004 - 07:28:18 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:


Still problems with interactive behavior. Running KDE, with top
running in xterm, scrolling through the menus I get some pauses. When
the pauses occur I see kdeinit hit the top of the list and sometimes
consuming 90% or more of a CPU and idle usage drops to 30-40%. I do
see some latency traces (not really high ones) in the log that were
generated by kdeinit but I think they were generated prior to when
these pauses occurred, most likely when logging in.

is this 90% or more CPU time system (kernel) overhead or userspace
overhead?


It appears that most of the time is being consumed in system (~50% vs. ~6%).

another thing to watch for is the context-switch rate in vmstat. -V0.3
patches include a hack that include involuntary context-switches (mutex
context switches) in the context-switch stat as well. (previously those
were reported in a separate field which vmstat didnt pick up.)

So if the context-switch rate shots up to above say 100K/sec that is a
sure sign of some mutex badness. The livelock scenarios i solved in
-V0.3 occasionally generated a more than 500K/sec context-switch rate on
a 2GHz box. Having just a couple of thousand per sec isnt by itself a
sign of anything unusual.

As for the context-switch, I do see this jump up to ~10-11K/sec from ~4-5K/sec and I see this only when I trigger the pauses.


Ingo


kr
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