Robert,
The post of yours that Paul linked to sounds very similar to something
we saw with VR Juggler & OSG a while back: terrible performance with OSG
apps that had parallel draw threads. In our case, VR Juggler manages
threading, but the same may apply to OSG with osgViewer.
For us, it turned out that we had to set the threads' affinity to lock
them to a particular CPU/core. The Linux scheduler moved the threads
around and thrashed the cache, I believe. Setting the affinity boosted
the parallel draw performance back up.
The solution we ended up with is twofold:
1. Add a default behavior that sequentially locks draw threads to CPU
cores (0,1,2,etc. & repeat)
2. Use an environment variable to override the default behavior
(VJ_DRAW_THREAD_AFFINITY, a space-delimited list of integers).
The default behavior is good for most users, but we can squeeze out a
little more performance by tweaking the environment variable. For a
system with two draw threads and two dual-core CPUs, the default
behavior locks the draw threads to CPUs 0 & 1, but we get slightly
better performance if we set VJ_DRAW_THREAD_AFFINITY="2 3".
Regards,
Todd
Robert Osfield wrote:
Hi Paul,
On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 10:19 PM, Paul Martz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Robert -- Prior to the 2.2 release, code was added to serialize the draw
dispatch. Is there a reason that this behavior defaults to ON? (See
DisplaySettings.cpp line 135.) I have somehow incorrectly documented this as
defaulting to OFF in the ref man. Now that I see it's ON by default, I half
wonder if this is a bug. Wanted to check with you: should I change the
documentation, or the code? Which is right?
The settings has been ON since I introduced the option to serialize
the draw dispatch.
Just before the 2.6 release I did testing at my end and still found
serializing the draw dispatch to be far more effiecent on my
Linux/NVidia drivers so I left the option on.
In the original thread when I introduced the optional draw mutex into
the draw dispatch I did call for testing on the performance impact but
I didn't get sufficient feedback to make a more informed decision than
just basing it on my own testing. I would still appreciate more
testing, as I'd expect that best default setting to vary on different
hardware and drivers - I for one would love to see better scalability
in driver/hardware.
Robert.
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