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Date:      Thu, 16 May 1996 09:33:15 -0500 (EST)
From:      "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>
To:        babkin@hq.icb.chel.su (Serge A. Babkin)
Cc:        dyson@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: EDO & Memory latency
Message-ID:  <199605161433.JAA13613@dyson.iquest.net>
In-Reply-To: <199605160907.PAA10321@hq.icb.chel.su> from "Serge A. Babkin" at May 16, 96 03:07:44 pm

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> 
> > You likely are seeing TLB overhead intrinsic to the processor.  Some processors
> > don't have microcode TLB management, and you'll see worse numbers, because the
> > TLB needs to be handled in normal machine/assembly code.  (Of course, on those
> > processors, you can tune the TLB management more freely.)
> 
> But I tried to run it on Pentium that has microcode implementation of TLB.
> 
What I was implying above was that R4400 (approx the same speed in general
as a fast pentium) was taking 2usecs, while the Pentium takes 400usecs
(on my machine).  Paging isn't the issue, it is TLB updates and propagation
through the glue and cache to main memory.  R4400's don't handle the TLB
in microcode, and the Pentium does.  This is one of the *big* suprises
that people sometimes find out -- those TLB updates do make a difference.
I had a customer whose application was running several times slower on
a R4400 box than expected.  It was due to clashing with the TLB update
policy.  We reorganized the code, and the performance went up higher than
expectations!!!

If you caused your system to page, that is because there were other pages
in the system that the VM system deemed to be higher priority, or you
were simply out of memory.

John



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