Hi,
Have a look at 2.4.10 - I believe this has a similar optimization?
Re-running your benchmark against plain 2.4.10 would be interesting.
Cheers
Chris
On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Bond, Andrew wrote:
> I have come up with a change to the kiobuf_init() routine that
> drops the blind memset() to 0 of the entire kiobuf structure and zeros
> out 3 specific fields instead. Since this is done on every IO and the
> kiobuf structure is over 8K in size (8756 bytes I believe) it becomes
> quite costly from a cpu cycle perspective as well as a cache utilization
> perspective. The typical IO path uses a small subset of the
> preallocated fields within the kiobuf structure. Therefore, the IO path
> pays a performance penalty for having to zero out many fields that it
> typically doesn't use.
>
> The kiobuf_init() routine using a memset() of the entire kiobuf
> structure is in the top 10 of cpu consuming kernel routines in Oracle 9i
> testing using raw io. Using the included kiobuf_init patch, our testing
> has shown a 5% improvement in Oracle transactional performance in 4 and
> 8 processor configurations, and the kiobuf_init() routine became a
> non-issue for performance. The testing was performed with Oracle, but
> this patch could provide performance improvements to any application
> that uses raw IO or relies on kiobufs in the IO path.
>
> Obviously, since the structure is no longer set to zero, any
> code that makes a zero assumption would break. I haven't come across
> code that makes this assumption yet for fields that I did not
> specifically zero out in the patch, but I could very well be missing
> something. It appears that Alan has included this patch in his
> 2.4.10-ac4 tree. So, let me know if you have any problems that you
> think might be related to this patch. Any input would be greatly
> appreciated.
>
> The patch is against a 2.4.9 tree, but it is localized to just
> the kiobuf_init() routine and should apply to any of the recent kernels.
>
> Run from the root level of your kernel tree:
> patch -p1 < kiobuf_init_speedup.patch
>
> I cannot currently receive the kernel mailing list at this email
> address, so please cc: me on posts related to this patch.
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew Bond
>
> <<kiobuf_init_speedup.patch>>
>
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