[Lse-tech] New benchmark ?

[Shailabh N. <na...@us...>]

A few thoughts on the nature of chat room in the context of its use as
a scheduler benchmark :

Why are messages being exchanged between the server and client threads ?
If it is to primarily cause threads to do a sleep/wakeup (and thereby
exercise reschedule_idle()),
can we achieve the same result by having threads do timed sleeps, with the
sleep times randomly chosen from
an appropriate distribution ? This would probably eliminate the TCP related
problems we're seeing, but would
it still be meaningful ?

I can think of a totally synthetic benchmark in which threads do a
(possibly random) amount of compute followed (randomly) by
a sleep (for a random time) or a  yield or even some I/O. The computation
could be constructed to pollute the cache a bit etc.
The number of threads spawned would of course, be parameterized as well.

I guess the key would be in the choice of the parameters, but what would it
mean in terms of acceptability as a kernel scheduler benchmark ?


Shailabh Nagar
(914) 945 2851
na...@us...