Strawman proposal: making libthr default thread implementation?

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Robert Watson wrote:

> management of kernel load.  This advantage does not carry over to real-world 
> application loads, however, which tend to use a smaller thread worker pools 
> with sequences of locality-rich transaction, which is why libthr performs 
> btter as the workload approaches real-world conditions.  This 
> micro-benchmark makes for quite an interesting study piece, as you can 
> easily vary the thread/proc model, the number of workers, and the 
> transaction size, giving pretty clear performance curves to compare.

BTW, it would be really helpful if we had more (and perhaps better) potted 
benchmarks for threaded applications.  Supersmack has made benchmarking MySQL 
easy, even though it turns out to be a rather un-representative workload 
(better workloads actually appear to shed better light on FreeBSD performance, 
FWIW).  What I'm utterly unable to benchmark now are threaded UI applications, 
such as Mozilla, KDE, etc, which use threads quite a bit, but don't come with 
ways to capture their performance behavior reproduceably.  I would really like 
to see a tool for measuring the perceivable latency impact of kernel changes 
on user applications.  "It feels more snappy" is valuable but entirely 
anecdotal...

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge