Re: Improved multiprocessor usage on amd64

From: cpghost <cpghost_at_cordula.ws>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:40:11 +0000
On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 11:06:07AM +0200, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> cpghost <cpghost_at_cordula.ws> wrote:
>  > On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 08:38:00PM -0500, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>  > > I have a dual core amd64 on which I run a processor intensive numerical 
>  > > program.  I had been frustrated because it seemed to run 3 or 4 times 
>  > > faster under Linux.  But with a recent upgrade of FreeBSD-CURRENT, it 
>  > > now goes at about the same speed as Linux.
>  > > 
>  > > The program takes about an hour.  For the first minute, the program runs 
>  > > rather slowly, but then it is as if the operating system finds its way, 
>  > > and suddenly it speeds up.  "top -H" suggests that for the first minute 
>  > > that one thread is going really slowly, and is perhaps being starved or 
>  > > something.
>  > > 
>  > > My question is - why is this happening, and is this something I should 
>  > > expect?  Are there certain switches or sysctls I can set to make it go 
>  > > fast from the get go?
>  > 
>  > It looks like you're running powerd (see in /etc/rc.conf). It can take up
>  > to a minute for the load average of the machine to exceed a certain
>  > threshold where powerd would finally bump the cpu(s) to full speed.
> 
> No.  powerd(8) does not look at the load average at all,
> it looks at the CPU usage.  It detects within 0.5 seconds
> (the default polling interval) when the CPU usage went up
> and starts adjusting the performance.  It certainly doesn't
> take a minute.

Oh, yes, you're right: I stand corrected. powerd looks at the
kern.cp_time sysctl and not at the load average.

> Best regards
>    Oliver

Thanks,
-cpghost.

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Received on Tue Sep 16 2008 - 11:40:08 UTC

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