Bill, In order to manifest the context switch problem you will definitely require clients to be set to more than one in pgbench. It only occurs when 2 or more backends need access to shared memory.
If you want help backpatching Gavin's patch I'll be glad to do it for you, but you do need a recent kernel. Dave On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 14:48, Bill Montgomery wrote: > Michael Adler wrote: > > >On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 11:48:41AM -0400, Bill Montgomery wrote: > > > > > >>Alan Stange wrote: > >> > >>The same test on a Dell PowerEdge 1750, Dual Xeon 3.2 GHz, 512k cache, > >>HT on, Linux 2.4.21-20.ELsmp (RHEL 3), 4GB memory, pg 7.4.5: > >> > >>Far less performance that the Dual Opterons with a low number of > >>clients, but the gap narrows as the number of clients goes up. Anyone > >>smarter than me care to explain? > >> > >> > > > >You'll have to wait for someone smarter than you, but I will posit > >this: Did you use a tmpfs filesystem like Alan? You didn't mention > >either way. Alan did that as an attempt remove IO as a variable. > > > >-Mike > > > > > > Yes, I should have been more explicit. My goal was to replicate his > experiment as closely as possible in my environment, so I did run my > postgres data directory on a tmpfs. > > -Bill Montgomery > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster -- Dave Cramer 519 939 0336 ICQ # 14675561 www.postgresintl.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match