Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 12:49:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: david@lang.hm
To: David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com>
cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: RE: scheduling oddity on 2.6.20.3 stock
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On Thu, 3 May 2007, David Schwartz wrote:

>> I needed to recompress some files from .bz2 to .gz so I setup a script to
>> do
>>
>> bunzip2 -c $file.bz2 |gzip -9 >$file.gz
>>
>> I expected that the two CPU heavy processes would end up on different
>> cpu's and spend a little time shuffling data between the two cpu's on a
>> system (dual core opteron)
>>
>> however, instead what I find is that each process is getting 50% of one
>> cpu while the other cpu is 97% idle.
>
> That would only be possible if the compression/decompression block size is
> small compared to the maximum pipe buffer size. I suspect the reverse is the
> case.

I'm still running into this problem in various forms

is there an easy way to change the maximum pipe buffer size? (including a 
simple change to the kernel source, I do compile my own kernels)

> It would be interesting to write an intermediate process that basically
> enlarged the pipe buffers and see if that changed anything. Basically, the
> intermediate process would allocate a large buffer (16MB or so) and fill it
> from 'bunzip2' while draining it to 'gzip' in a non-blocking way (unless the
> buffer was full/empty, of course).
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