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Date:      Tue, 10 Jul 2001 10:00:39 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Michal Mertl <mime@traveller.cz>
To:        Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>
Cc:        freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Is SMP BETA in STABLE?
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSO.4.21.0107100847070.14739-100000@prg.traveller.cz>
In-Reply-To: <200107091944.f69JiW799011@earth.backplane.com>

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On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Matt Dillon wrote:

> 
> :Er, then what are the 8 httpd processes I see running on my machine?
> :It may well be that Apache handles all requests from a single client
> :in one process, to avoid unfairness, so you might try hitting it
> :from multiple clients.
> :
> :Oh yes - I've been running smp on two machines since 4.0, with
> :absolutely zero problems.  But they're lightly loaded, except
> :during make buildworld.
> :
> :Barney Wolff
> :
> :On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 10:46:37AM -0500, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> :> 
> :> Apache is a single threaded program, each instance should only be able
> :> to take up one cpu on a mp system, so what you're seeing looks like
> :> it makes sense.
> 
>     On -stable, only one cpu can be running in the kernel at any given time.
>     The cpu's can only run in parallel when running in userland (or one in the
>     kernel and the other in userland).  So if your web server is basically
>     just copying bits, it will be running mostly in the kernel.  If your
>     web server is doing significant userland processing, you will see both
>     cpu's in use - that is assuming that you have a significant enough
>     web load. 
> 
Thanks. That clarifies the thing. 

The consequence of this is that as I assume a lot of web server processing
is quite simple this 'one kernel at a time' seems quite limiting for
serving apache on stable. Do you know if the people telling SMP in Linux
kernel (say 2.2 and 2.4) is better (I mean better performing)
right? I won't switch to Linux anyway :-).

The page I tested on was in perl - I bechmarked once with mod-perl and
once without (got interesting results - on dual p3-600 with mod-perl I got
17 pages/second and without 1.6) and resulting html was about 1.5Kb. Both
cases showed a little more than 50% cpu utilization. This could mean than
(even with a bit more complicated page) the overhead of connection setup
(may be mostly Apache's fault) and data transfer (even on loopback) is
crucial. 

I'll do some more benchmarking because I thing it's not correct setup to
benchmark on localhost. I'll also look at ApacheBench. It's implementation
may quite easily affect the results too.

This is getting quite off-topic, but I think that lot of people interested
in FreeBSD on SMP machines do on their servers webserving so they might be
a bit interested.



-- 
Michal Mertl
mime@traveller.cz



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