[THIN] Re: latency
- From: "Braebaum, Neil" <neil.braebaum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 13:43:54 +0100
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bernd Harzog [mailto:bernd@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 04 October 2002 12:56
> To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [THIN] Re: latency
>
> Neil,
>
> Kevin Goodman (the founder of KevSoft, and the person who
> invented and wrote TScale), believes that a substantial
> portion of the kernel mode activity which occurs as the OS is
> using the CPU to keep its own house in order is not reported
> in CPU utilization counters.
I don't have any thing authoritative to dispute this, other than to say, I
can witness and monitor system activity - and this normally becomes a
requirement, when having issues along these lines.
> A specific example would be if a
> kernel mode driver were to go into an infinite loop,
Yup - seen that sort of activity, had to trace it, and have managed to trace
it with perfmon and task manager.
> this
> would block user mode activity and in turn cause CPU counters
> to go down to zero,
Not in my experience.
The counters don't got to zero.
And besides - don't you think that's a little naive? Just because an
application runs largely in user mode, does not mean that all the hooks it
references do. Otherwise, things like task manager and / or perfmon would
never truly work.
> while the CPU would in fact be
> unavailable to do useful work for users.
Threads can have priority, and / or be looping. In such case, it's the
kernel mode activity, that by it's very nature, can't (normally) be
interrupted (I'm think OS rings, here).
> We have observed the converse in many successful TScale
> installations. Specifically, as TScale has eliminated page
> file activity (which is kernel mode activity)
So is general memory usage - ultimately.
> from the
> execution threads of applications, CPU utilization has gone
> up. The reason it has gone up is that now more CPU is
> available to do useful work for users, and as the CPU does
> useful work for users the system performs better, scales better, etc.
The true reason is merely that there are possible less steps required to
serve the memory demands / and/or the requests can be served more quickly by
pages in physical memory (read: RAM) as opposed to having to fetch them from
virtual memory.
> The bottom line answer to your question is that yes, we
> believe that CPU utilization counters are misleading because
> they do not include CPU utilized by the OS in kernel mode
> tasks.
I've *never* seen it, and I *have* had numerous instances where I've had to
trace looping (read: cpu draining) kernel mode drivers. As always, YMMV, but
I'm far from convinced that the counters mislead, or don't report - unless
the machine is too damn busy to respond to anything else, other than the
looping thread, in which case the box is effectively dead, anyways.
Not trying to pick a fight, just saw things mentioned that don't square with
me. Perhaps others may comment their thoughts?
Neil
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