Re: Performance problems on 4/8way Opteron (dualcore) HP

Dirk Lutzebäck <lutzeb@aeccom.com>

From: Dirk Lutzebäck <lutzeb@aeccom.com>
To: "J. Andrew Rogers" <jrogers@neopolitan.com>
Cc: josh@agliodbs.com, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org, Sven Geisler <sgeisler@aeccom.com>
Date: 2005-07-31T10:12:32Z
Lists: pgsql-performance
Anybody knows if RedHat is already supporting this patch on an 
enterprise version?

Regards,

Dirk



J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> On 7/29/05 10:46 AM, "Josh Berkus" <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> 
>>>does anybody have expierence with this machine (4x 875 dual core Opteron
>>>CPUs)?
>>
>>Nope.   I suspect that you may be the first person to report in on
>>dual-cores.  There may be special compile issues with dual-cores that
>>we've not yet encountered.
> 
> 
> 
> There was recently a discussion of similar types of problems on a couple of
> the supercomputing lists, regarding surprisingly substandard performance
> from large dual-core opteron installations.
> 
> The problem as I remember it boiled down to the Linux kernel handling
> memory/process management very badly on large dual core systems --
> pathological NUMA behavior.  However, this problem has apparently been fixed
> in Linux v2.6.12+, and using the more recent kernel on large dual core
> systems generated *massive* performance improvements on these systems for
> the individuals with this issue.  Using the patched kernel, one gets the
> performance most people were expecting.
> 
> The v2.6.12+ kernels are a bit new, but they contain a very important
> performance patch for systems like the one above.  It would definitely be
> worth testing if possible.
> 
> 
> J. Andrew Rogers
> 
>