Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 13 Feb 2001 14:23:53 -0700
From:      Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>
To:        void <float@firedrake.org>
Cc:        Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com>, kstewart@urx.com, Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: soft updates performance 
Message-ID:  <200102132123.f1DLNrW41419@harmony.village.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 13 Feb 2001 19:16:59 GMT." <20010213191659.A5429@firedrake.org> 
References:  <20010213191659.A5429@firedrake.org>  <kstewart@urx.com> <81045.982046200@winston.osd.bsdi.com> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In message <20010213191659.A5429@firedrake.org> void writes:
: On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 10:36:40PM -0800, Jordan Hubbard wrote:
: > 
: > With how many running processors?  If you're running -j4 on a
: > uniprocessor system, you're only introducing competition for already
: > scarce CPU resources, though -j2 can be a speedup since this allows
: > one target build to run while another is in an I/O wait.  I've only
: > seen a speedup with -j4 when using at least 2 CPUs.
: 
: Interesting.  When I asked about optimal values on this list maybe a
: year ago, I was told that -j(4 * NCPU) was a good choice.  I guess that
: doesn't work for NCPU == 1.

Back at Solbourne (Sparc multiprossors running in the 50-75MHz range), 
the optimal value was determined imperically to be between 1.3 and 1.7 
times the number of CPUs rounded up.  A 8 CPU system made the kernel
fasted at about -j13 or so.  But the whole range from -j 10 to -j 15
gave within 5% of the optimal value.

I've seen speedups on systems with very fast memory subsystems, but
only decent disks with -j 4.  My PII 500 was one such beast.  However, 
-j 4 wasn't 2x faster than -j 2.  It was more like 1.2 or 1.3 x faster 
(eg 20% or so).  If a -j 1 kernel build took 600s, a -j 2 build
would take 375-400s while a -j 4 would take more like 320-340.  I also 
had a lot of memory on this box, so the extra jobs weren't fighting
each other for that.  NFS was involved, so maybe that throws the mix
off :-)

Your milage may vary.  This sort of thing is fairly dependent on the
actual system, but it varies from no gain to big gains.

Warner


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200102132123.f1DLNrW41419>