[KLUG Members] 2.6 and NPTL

[Peter Buxton]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 06:10:34AM -0500, Adam Williams was only escaped
   alone to tell thee:

> Can you mark and change in performance? [ I still find the whole
> PID/no-PID debate interesting, not certain which is conceptually
> correct. ]

Sadly, I have no lmbench statistics to show you. You'll note that the
Pan task, which was working at downloading messages and headers when I
catted /proc/$PID/status, was in fact sleeping when I did this. I'm not
sure if I have any applications which would stress threading
functionality on this box.

Consider that I've had 2.6 for a while. While the new NPTL offers better
threading, it isn't necessarily faster threading -- that happened
in-kernel, so I'd not be likely to notice now. I think NPTL offers more
correct threading that, as a secondary effect, is faster.

On the other hand, though this won't excite YOU, Adam:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1077 says:

EXT3.
~~~~~
- The ext3 filesystem has gained indexed directory support, which offers
  considerable performance gains when used on filesystems with
  directories containing large numbers of files.
- In order to use the htree feature, you need at least version 1.32 of
  e2fsprogs.
- Existing filesystems can be converted using the command

    tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/hdXXX


I can't say which is and which isn't NPTL and which is the above
command, which I ran some time last night or the one before, but omigod
is this machine faster. kdm loaded my KDE 3.1.4 at a BLISTERING pace. I
mean, like more than TWICE as fast -- much more.

/var, which also contains /home and /tmp, is ReiserFS 3.6. / is still,
because of a long-delayed plan to test FS's and move it, ext3.


-- 
Power tools for power fools.