Re: Interbench real time benchmark results

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Tue Jul 19 2005 - 17:33:39 EST



* Con Kolivas <kernel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Not entirely what some would expect. Very little difference under low
> loads, but the maximum latencies exhibited are about the same at
> 300us. However they hare under different workloads. With these
> worklods, on this hardware, running these real time simulations there
> is not a convincing argument for CONFIG-PREEMPT. Note that running
> interbench with the non-real time benchmarks also does not show a
> convincing reason for preempt.

while i do like the PREEMPT_RT results, i think we need to do two more
things to have total confidence in the numbers:

- i think we'll need to increase the number of sample points, by both
increasing the frequency of samples, and by lengthening the
test-time - even if just for a single testrun. Some of the worst-case
latencies i care about in PREEMPT_RT trigger only once every couple
of million interrupts (!). For human interactivity we probably dont
care that much though.

- many of the worst-case latencies relate to some sort of extreme
situation within a particular algorithm. E.g. lots of tasks being
around. Do this for example:

hackbench 50

and Ctrl-Z it after a couple of seconds. You'll see a 1msec (or
larger) blip.

or, fill up swapspace, so that the swap allocation map gets filled
up.

- networking is another frequent source of latencies - it might make
sense to add a workload doing lots of socket IO. (localhost might be
enough, but not for everything)

Ingo
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