Hello, I've been investigating a performance problem on a server using OpenLDAP 2.2.26 for nss resolution and running kernel 2.6.12.
When a CPU bound process such as GCC is running in the background (even at nice 10), many trivial commands such as "su" or "groups" become extremely slow and take a few seconds to complete. strace revealed that data exchange over the slapd socket was where most of the time was spent. Looking at the slapd side, I see several calls to sched_yield() like this: [pid 8780] 0.000033 stat64("gidNumber.dbb", 0xb7b3ebcc) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied) [pid 8780] 0.000059 pread(20, "\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\2\0\344\17\2\3"..., 4096, 4096) = 4096 [pid 8780] 0.000083 pread(20, "\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\4\0\0\0\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\222\0<\7\1\5\370"..., 4096, 16384) = 4096 [pid 8780] 0.000078 time(NULL) = 1124322520 [pid 8780] 0.000066 pread(11, "\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\250\0\0\0\231\0\0\0\235\0\0\0\16\0000"..., 4096, 688128) = 4096 [pid 8780] 0.000241 write(19, "0e\2\1\3d`\4$cn=bernie,ou=group,dc=d"..., 103) = 103 [pid 8780] 0.000137 sched_yield( <unfinished ...> [pid 8781] 0.050020 <... sched_yield resumed> ) = 0 [pid 8780] 0.000025 <... sched_yield resumed> ) = 0 [pid 8781] 0.000060 futex(0x925ab20, FUTEX_WAIT, 33, NULL <unfinished ...> [pid 8780] 0.000026 write(19, "0\f\2\1\3e\7\n\1\0\4\0\4\0", 14) = 14 [pid 8774] 0.000774 <... select resumed> ) = 1 (in [19]) The relative timestamp reveals that slapd is spending 50ms after yielding. Meanwhile, GCC is probably being scheduled for a whole quantum. Reading the man-page of sched_yield() it seems this isn't the correct behavior: Note: If the current process is the only process in the highest priority list at that time, this process will continue to run after a call to sched_yield. I also think OpenLDAP is wrong. First, it should be calling pthread_yield() because slapd is a multithreading process and it just wants to run the other threads. See: int ldap_pvt_thread_yield( void ) { #if HAVE_THR_YIELD return thr_yield(); #elif HAVE_PTHREADS == 10 return sched_yield(); #elif defined(_POSIX_THREAD_IS_GNU_PTH) sched_yield(); return 0; #elif HAVE_PTHREADS == 6 pthread_yield(NULL); return 0; #else pthread_yield(); return 0; #endif } -- // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept. \X/ http://www.develer.com/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/