Re: [patch 0/9] mutex subsystem, -V4

From: Mike Galbraith
Date: Mon Dec 26 2005 - 12:26:00 EST


At 03:11 AM 12/26/2005 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
Arjan van de Ven <arjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> > hm. 16 CPUs hitting the same semaphore at great arrival rates. The cost
> > of a short spin is much less than the cost of a sleep/wakeup. The machine
> > was doing 100,000 - 200,000 context switches per second.
>
> interesting.. this might be a good indication that a "spin a bit first"
> mutex slowpath for some locks might be worth implementing...

If we see a workload which is triggering such high context switch rates,
maybe. But I don't think we've seen any such for a long time.

Hmm. Is there a real workload where such a high context switch rate is necessary? Every time I've seen a high (100,000 - 200,000 is beyond absurd on my little box, but...) context switch rate, it's been because something sucked.

-Mike

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