HyperThreading

[Saman Barghi]

I apologize for the delay, I was a little bit busy. 

Sorry, I am not following, by master you mean the master branch !? 

Yep; we produce CD snapshots each night, they're from the latest git code as of that day. I
 believe this results belong to the master branch. As I pulled it 
through git and build a custom Kernel based on it. I think I have to 
change the labels then. I will redo the whole experiment with 2.8 
branch. Correct me if I am wrong: I have to pull this branch:     
DragonFly_RELEASE_2_8, right ? 







Can you give us a bit more information about the h/w and 
configuration? In Kris Kennaway's tests, he was seeing FreeBSD 7 sustain
 8 times the number of transactions you're reporting for 8.1, and that 
was for hardware that is three or four years old at this point. 



I see, good point. The machine I am testing on  is a  4 core xeon with 2GB of RAM, and I it
 is  2 to 3 years old as well (The machine Kris were using was a "2.0Ghz
 8-core amd64 system with 16GB of
RAM", so as it has twice the number of cores and 8 times more memory 
than what I have here, I think the results are fair for number of 
transactions). I might be able to re run the tests on another 
machine if I get lucky. MySQL 
configuration is exactly the same as what Kris used 
(http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/my.cnf), I am using MySQL 5.0.91. Here is the sysbench command : 



http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/4cpu-mysql.png
 was on a 4 x p3 700mhz; I believe (but we should ask Kris) that the 
opterons were not used for the cross-OS comparisons; they were used for 
the fbsd 5.5 vs 6.2 vs 7.0 tests. (see the titles on that graph vs the 
cross-OS comparison). Happen to know what sort of Xeons exactly?
I will email Kris and ask him about it. 
Comparing the figures, transaction/sec makes more sens.I  am not sure 
about the specifications of the CPU, as I do not have physical access to
 them. 



Also, last I tried sysbench/OLTP with 
MySQL on dfly, I saw MySQL making many 256K allocations, which fall back
 to mmap() in our system. mmap() acquires the VM token, so I expected to
 see a much more dramatic falloff than you saw.



 I will double check if 
everything is working properly and there is no mistake in configuration 
of both machines. Do you remember which version of MySQL you were using 
?and What is the best way of profiling in DragonFly ?! 


I used MySQL 5.1.37 I believe.  Somewhere Kris mentioned  Mysql 5.1 Performance is worse that 5.0 when it comes to scaling.   

Watch the output of systat -pv; you'll be able to see contended tokens.I ran sysbench again along with systat running, but in the contention part nothing really changes. is there something wrong ?

Cheers,Saman