Improving IPMI performance under load

From: Martin Wilck
Date: Tue Mar 24 2009 - 05:30:27 EST


Hi Corey,

yesterday I posted some results about the IPMI performance under CPU load, which can be up to 25 times slower than in an idle system. I think it might be worthwhile to try to improve that behavior as well.

I made a variation of my patch which introduces a second parameter (kipmid_min_busy) that causes kipmid not to call schedule() for a certain amount of time. Thus if there's IPMI traffic pending, kipmid will busy-loop for kipmid_min_busy seconds, then starting to schedule() in each loop as it does now, and finally go to sleep when kipmid_max_busy is reached. At the same time, I changed the nice value of kipmid from 19 to 0.

With this patch and e.g. min_busy=100 and max_busy=200, there is no noticeable difference any more between IPMI performance with and without CPU load.

The patch + results still need cleanup, therefore I am not sending it right now. Just wanted to hear what you think.

Martin

--
Martin Wilck
PRIMERGY System Software Engineer
FSC IP ESP DEV 6

Fujitsu Siemens Computers GmbH
Heinz-Nixdorf-Ring 1
33106 Paderborn
Germany

Tel: ++49 5251 525 2796
Fax: ++49 5251 525 2820
Email: mailto:martin.wilck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Internet: http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com
Company Details: http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/imprint.html
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