Re: beta3 Solaris 7 (SPARC) port report

On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 05:03:13PM +0100, Frank Joerdens wrote:
>
> There is no load at all on this server at the moment. The sysadmin and
> myself are currently the only people accessing a brand new UltraSPARC with 3
> CPUs and 3/4 GB of RAM to install stuff.

Hmm, multiple processors, and lots of IPC: I've got a bad feeling
about this. Nothing solid (don't do a lot with Solaris), but there are
a _lot_ of gotchas in getting that combo right, many of which _kill_
performance for the normal case to get correct behavior in an edge
case. I could imagine Sun missing one or two, and not catching it (or
actively ignoring it, to get better CPU utilization)

Since it seems to hit only when using Unix domain sockets, I'd take a
wild guess that explicit use of shared memory and Unix domain sockets
are stepping on each other in a multiprocessor environment. Invoking
Inet sockets gets more of the networking code in play, which is usually
more heavily tested in such an environment.

Since it's just you and the sysadmin: any chance you could bring the
system up uniprocessor (I don't even know if this is _possible_ with
Sun hardware, let alone how hard) and run the regressions some more?
If that makes it go away, I'd say it pretty well points straight into
the Solaris kernel.

Ross
--
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm(at)rice(dot)edu>
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St., Houston, TX 77005