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Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2001 23:39:17 +0000 (GMT)
From: Matthew Kirkwood <matthew@hairy.beasts.org>
To: Jonathan Lahr <lahr@sequent.com>
cc: Anton Blanchard <anton@linuxcare.com.au>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: kernel lock contention and scalability
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On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Jonathan Lahr wrote:

[ sorry to reply over another reply, but I don't have
  the original of this ]

> > Tridge and I tried out the postgresql benchmark you used here and this
> > contention is due to a bug in postgres. From a quick strace, we found
> > the threads do a load of select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0,0}).

I can shed some light on this (though I'm far from a PG hacker).

Postgres can use either of two locking methods -- SysV semaphores
(which it tries to avoid, asusming that they'll be too heavy) or
userspace spinlocks (via inline assembler on platforms which support
it).

In the slow path of a spinlock_acquire they busy wait for a few
cycles, and then call schedule with a zero timeout assuming that
it'll basically do the same as a sched_yield() but more portably.

Matthew.

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