BTW, our designer got the nytprofile or whatever it is called for Perl and found out that it was a problem with the POE library that was being used as a state-machine to drive the whole load suite. It was taking something like 95% of the CPU time! On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Alan McKay<alan.mckay@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hey folks, > > I'm new to all this stuff, and am sitting here with kSar looking at > some graphed results of some load tests we did, trying to figure > things out :-) > > We got some unsatisfactory results in stressing our system, and now I > have to divine where the bottleneck is. > > We did 4 tests, upping the load each time. The 3rd and 4th ones have > all 8 cores pegged at about 95%. Yikes! > > In the first test the processor running queue spikes at 7 and maybe > averages 4 or 5 > > In the last test it spikes at 33 with an average maybe 25. > > Looks to me like it could be a CPU bottleneck. But I'm new at this :-) > > Is there a general rule of thumb "if queue is longer than X, it is > likely a bottleneck?" > > In reading an IBM Redbook on Linux performance, I also see this : > "High numbers of context switches in connection with a large number of > interrupts can signal driver or application issues." > > On my first test where the CPU is not pegged, context switching goes > from about 3700 to about 4900, maybe averaging 4100 > > On the pegged test, the values are maybe 10% higher than that, maybe 15%. > > It is an IBM 3550 with 8 cores, 2660.134 MHz (from dmesg), 32Gigs RAM > > thanks, > -Alan > > -- > “Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV” > - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food" > -- “Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV” - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food" -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance