Re: spinlocks on HP-UX

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov>
Cc: "Robert Haas" <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: spinlocks on HP-UX
Date: 2011-08-29 19:12:51
Message-ID: 10108.1314645171@sss.pgh.pa.us
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"Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> writes:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Stepping beyond the immediate issue of whether we want an unlocked
>> test in there or not (and I agree that based on these numbers we
>> don't), there's a clear and puzzling difference between those sets
>> of numbers. The Opteron test is showing 32 clients getting about
>> 23.9 times the throughput of a single client, which is not exactly
>> linear but is at least respectable, whereas the PPC64 test is
>> showing 32 clients getting just 14.5 times the throughput of a
>> single client, which is pretty significantly less good.

> I wouldn't make too much of that without comparing to a STREAM test
> (properly configured -- the default array size is likely not to be
> large enough for these machines).

Yeah. One point I didn't mention is that the Opteron machine's memory
is split across 8 NUMA nodes, whereas the PPC machine's isn't. I would
bet there's a significant difference in aggregate available memory
bandwidth.

Also, if the PPC machine really is hyperthreaded (the internal webpage
for it says "Hyper? True" but /proc/cpuinfo doesn't provide any clear
indications), that might mean it's not going to scale too well past 16x
the single-thread case.

regards, tom lane

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