Re: pgbench internal contention

On 07/29/2011 04:00 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On machines with lots of CPU cores, pgbench can start eating up a lot
> of system time. Investigation reveals that the problem is with
> random(), which glibc implements like this:
>
> long int
> __random ()
> {
> int32_t retval;
> __libc_lock_lock (lock);
> (void) __random_r (&unsafe_state,&retval);
> __libc_lock_unlock (lock);
> return retval;
> }
> weak_alias (__random, random)
>
> Rather obviously, if you're running enough pgbench threads, you're
> going to have a pretty ugly point of contention there. On the 32-core
> machine provided by Nate Boley, with my usual 5-minute SELECT-only
> test, lazy-vxid and sinval-fastmessages applied, and scale factor 100,
> "time" shows that pgbench uses almost as much system time as user
> time:
>
> $ time pgbench -n -S -T 300 -c 64 -j 64
> transaction type: SELECT only
> scaling factor: 100
> query mode: simple
> number of clients: 64
> number of threads: 64
> duration: 300 s
> number of transactions actually processed: 55319555
> tps = 184396.016257 (including connections establishing)
> tps = 184410.926840 (excluding connections establishing)
>
> real 5m0.019s
> user 21m10.100s
> sys 17m45.480s
>
> I patched it to use random_r() - the patch is attached - and here are
> the (rather gratifying) results of that test:
>
> $ time ./pgbench -n -S -T 300 -c 64 -j 64
> transaction type: SELECT only
> scaling factor: 100
> query mode: simple
> number of clients: 64
> number of threads: 64
> duration: 300 s
> number of transactions actually processed: 71851589
> tps = 239503.585813 (including connections establishing)
> tps = 239521.816698 (excluding connections establishing)
>
> real 5m0.016s
> user 20m40.880s
> sys 9m25.930s
>
> Since a client-limited benchmark isn't very interesting, I think this
> change makes sense. Thoughts? Objections? Coding style
> improvements?
>
>
>
>
>
How much randomness do we really need for test data. What if it where changed to more of a random starting point and then autoinc'd after that. Or if there were two func's, a rand() and a next(). If your test really needs randomness use rand(), otherwise use next(), it would be way faster, and you dont really care what the number is anyway.

-Andy