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Improving Linux Kernel Performance
developerWorks writes "The first step in improving Linux performance is quantifying it, but how exactly do you quantify performance for Linux or for comparable systems? In this article, members of the IBM Linux Technology Center share their expertise as they describe how they ran several benchmark tests on the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels late last year. The benchmarks provide coverage for a diverse set of workloads, including Web serving, database, and file serving. In addition, we show the various components of the kernel (disk I/O subsystem, for example) that are stressed by each benchmark."
I'm just curious what they are quantifying performance against. Everything here seemed to be strictly on the Network side of things. Are they trying to increase the actual Kernal processing of the individual threads for the network applications (File Serving, DB, and Webserving), or are they just measuring the eff. for the processing of data packets for the services.
It sounds interesting, but it looks like the tuning is done specifically on the IBM platform, which makes me wonder. Linux already blows and MS product away for these applications, so I'm curious what they are comparing the results to. Did they just take an arbitrary point (processor load) for specific applications, or are they creating a specialized measurement (like SysMarks in Windows) that is only valid in their test suite.
Anyway, it should be interesting to see where it ends up, eventually.
I was also suprised to see that they still use some of the old performance monitoring tools like looking at /proc, and other ascii tools, rather than something like PCP that collects all these statistics together so that you can look at any combination of subsystems on the same time line. Then they could have graphs showing the interraction and load on the disk, cpus, vm, network etc.
There is folly and foolishness on the one side, and daring and calculation on the other. - Admiral Pellew, Hornblower
Why is what we compare it to the most important issue?
Sure, we want to see how the Linux kernel is performing, but that's unrelated to increasing it's performance - when working on the performance of a single part, people built a test for that part, and tweaked it.
No benchmark or comparison is required in this case.
My other
Why does it seem that all these benchmarks are primarily concerned with CPU performance or network throughput or single-disk reading and writing? For a large category of enterprise applications (which this paper says it is trying to address), I/O performance can usually be the most important part.
The problem is that the typical PC hardware is just not designed for that. Large proprietary Unix or mainframe systems usually have multiple very high speed buses; a single 32-bit PCI bus is rather low-end in comparison. Now of course this is not Linux's fault; but then again Linux is not just a PC operating system! So I guess my question is if this is about benchmarking Linux for enterprise use, how about some information about Linux running on enterprise-class hardware rather than suped up PC's. I'm sure IBM must have a few resources there.
In particular I'm interested in how the Linux kernel is designed to handle multiple independent I/O buses. Are the I/O schedulers weighted down with locking issuesor interrupt contention. Or what about the allocation of memory buffers between faster and slower I/O devices. Or even it's support for advisory I/O operations (hinting) that some proprietary OS's provide? What about asynchronous I/O?
And of course Linux suffers from the general Unix philosophy when it come's to giving I/O the same level of attention as CPU. For instance there are lots of processor use controls, such as process nice levels, processor affinities, real-time schedulers, threading options galore, etc. But how do you say that a given process may only use 30% of the I/O bandwidth on a particular bus? And those are things that mainframes were good at, so how does Linux on mainframes compare?
Of course this applies to something else, like making transfers zero-copy, too.
Things actually useful are: disabling unnecessary services on startup (if you don't use atd, don't start it to save start-up time, and in many machines it is unnecessary to detect hardware changes using kudzu upon startup); for machines with multiple HD's, put the swap on the faster HD.
I wish there were some interactive workload benchmarks - I know this is history, but when the kernel went 1.2 I found my machine really slow; the benchmarks were better but somehow the usability had gone down. It would be neat to measure the way the mouse tracking feels, the "snap" with which menus open in an application, Netscape getting a page and rendering it, etc. . Kernel compilation and numerics are not the main use of a desktop machine these days ...
On a related note, my Mac Powerbook was really sluggish until I managed to kill some unneeded processes; they weren't really eating up time by themselves, but were somehow impacting system reactivity: The load factor hardly moved but the system became responsive to mouse clicks.
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I agree that I/O is a weakness of Linux currently and that it needs a lot more attention. CPU speeds and the ability of Linux to make the most of the processor is very good and has already been very well developed. With CPUs having advanced as far as they have in the past few years means that the CPU is no longer the main bottleneck of the system. I/O technologies have stood pretty much still with only small advances, so no wastage or inefficiencies on the part of the OS are acceptable.
It is a pity that Linux like Unix developers have become a little stuck in their ways - hopefully they will do their best to address this in the 2.6 and 3.0 kernels.
I like the idea of a modularised kernel, where people could use the I/O system that best suited their setup - but this could involve an awful lot of division and arguments and the number of bugs that would result could be huge. Perhaps Linux itself could automatically adapt the way it works more to suit its needs - hence solving the problem of Linux hugely varying performance. Does anyone else have any suggestions or comments on this?