Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 3 Jul 2012 10:16:48 -0500 | Subject | sandy bridge slower w/pthread condition variables, contended mutexes | From | Matt Garman <> |
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I have been looking at the performance of two servers: - dual Xeon X5550 2.67GHz (Nehalem, Dell R610) - dual Xeon E5-2690 2.90 GHz (Sandy Bridge, Dell R620 & HP dl360g8p)
For my particular (proprietary) application, the Sandy Bridge systems are significantly slower. At least one facet of this problem has to do with: - pthread condition variable signaling - pthread mutex lock contention
I wrote a simple (<300 lines) C program that demonstrates this: http://pastebin.com/0jPt0AJS
The program has two tests: - "lc", a lock contention test, where two threads "fight" over incrementing and decrementing an integer, arbitrated with a pthread_mutex_t - "cv", a condition variable signaling test, where two threads "politely" take turns incrementing and decrementing an integer, signaling each other with a condition variable
The program uses pthread_setaffinity_np() to pin each thread to its own CPU core.
I would expect the SNB-based servers to be faster, since they have a clockspeed and architecture advantage.
Results of X5550 @ 2.67 GHz server under CentOS 5.7: # ./snb_slow_demo -c 3 -C 5 -t cv -n 50000000 runtime, seconds ........ 143.339958
# ./snb_slow_demo -c 3 -C 5 -t lc -n 500000000 runtime, seconds ........ 58.278671
Results of Dell E5-2690 @ 2.90 GHz under CentOS 5.7: # ./snb_slow_demo -c 2 -C 4 -t cv -n 50000000 runtime, seconds ........ 179.272697
# ./snb_slow_demo -c 2 -C 4 -t lc -n 500000000 runtime, seconds ........ 103.437226
I upgraded the E5-2690 server to CentOS 6.2, then tried both the current release kernel.org kernel version 3.4.4, and also 3.5.0-rc5. The "lc" test results are about the same, but the "cv" tests are worse yet: the same test takes about 229 seconds to run.
Also noteworthy is that the HP has generally better performance than the Dell. But the HP E5-2690 is still worse than the X5550.
In all cases, for all servers, I disabled power-saving features (cpu frequency scaling, C-states, C1E). I verified with i7z that all CPUs spend 100% of their time in state C0.
Is this simply a corner case where Sandy Bridge is worse than its predecessor? Or is there an implementation problem?
Thanks, Matt
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