FreeBSD 5.2.1: Mutex/Spinlock starvation?

[Steven Hartland]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Watson" <rwatson at freebsd.org>

> Well, I know a bit about the general conditions -- situations where
> mutexes are held for short periods of time, rather than over long
> transactions.  I know from experience that adaptive mutexes can make an
> observable difference for system builds and IPC activities. 
> 
> To what extent do you have systems where you can reproduce your production
> load without impacting production quality?  I may have some interesting
> patches for you to try running with, if so :-).

Got two online Dev boxes I can play with, remote console backup
etc so would defo be willing to give them a shot and we run full
performance stats on all the machines so that would help determine
any gain. As you would expect a game server is constantly doing
net IO small amounts of disk IO and quite a chunk of logic
processing. The other thing of note is virtually all gameservers
run via the linux BC layer as game dev's dont generally have
a native port for FreeBSD.

I'm also currently benchmarking a dual opteron across a number
of OS's any changes you have could also be tested on that bed
vs 5.2.1-RELEASE along with the rest.

    Steve


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