Bottleneck Search
We did some basic profiling, and this allows us to eliminate a few bottlenecks as the cause of the performance issues. As we discussed in the first article, network performance wasn't an issue: we used a direct Gigabit Ethernet link between client and server. On average, the server received 4 Mbit/s and sent 19 Mbit/s of data, with a peak of 140 Mbit/s. That peak of 140 Mbit/s is only achieved when running at the highest performance (500-600 queries per second); the Apple machine stayed well below that peak.Another theory is published in a personal blog: the fsync() theory. Basically, the command forces the OS to write all the pending data to the disk drive, and then forces the disk drive to write all the data in its write cache to the platters. The theory is that most OSes do not force the last step, while Mac OS X does. However, this theory is not the reason for the lackluster performance that we noticed.
First of all, we saw at most 23 KB/s writes, again at peak performance, in the case of the Dual G5 running Mac OS X at 274 queries per second. To avoid excessive writing, our Dbbench client has a warm-up period where the database is put under load but no measurements take place. This makes our benchmarking consistent, and lowers the pressure on the disk system. You can read more about our MySQL test methods here. Secondly, we were using the MyISAM database engine, which does not support this "transactional safe writing".
MySQL Configuration
We played around with all the configurations' variables mentioned here, but none of them made any real difference for the Mac OS X MySQL performance. Again, the "query cache" was off, as we wanted to test worst case performance. More info on why we test this way can be found here.For those who are curious, we did a quick test with "query cache on". The Apple machine scored about 500 queries per second. In the case of the Linux x86 machines, we had to use several clients. It seems that each client can fire off at most 1000 queries per second. This appears to be a Windows 2003 limitation, since faster Opterons (2.6 GHz instead of 2.4 GHz) or quad Opteron clients (instead of dual) couldn't get us past this limit either. With several clients firing off queries, the Linux machines were capable of a peak of 2700 queries per second (and probably more - we had 3 clients at most), while the Mac was still limited to 500 queries per second. Note that this is "best case" performance, since up to 60% of the queries were picked out of the cache. With more random queries, these numbers are significantly lower.
Let us see if LMBench can make us wiser, now that we can compare Linux and Mac OS X on the Apple PowerMac.
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tthiel - Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - link
You need to redo this entire test. So much has come out about how poorly this was done its hard to believe it came from Anandtech.iggie - Friday, January 13, 2006 - link
I'm surprised you didn't post the raw VM latency results from lmbench. I found http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-yd...">another article that did a similar performance comparison (Darwin vs. Linux on G5).mmap latency is 3x greater, but most tellingly, page fault latency is > 900 x greater!
Did you observe similar results in your tests?
I would imagine that page faults would play a greater and greater role as more and more independent clients connect to a server. I have experienced a huge disparity in http://www.openmicroscopy.org/api/omeis/">our own server software implementation for scientific imaging. In our case, all disk access is done via mmap and page faults (its a shared-VM-based image server system meant to serve many terabytes of image data)
asifyoucare - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
Interesting article.If you suspect that thread performance is the bottleneck, why not write a short program to measure how many threads can be created and destroyed per second?
DoctorBooze - Saturday, September 3, 2005 - link
I'm no guru but I don't think that's true now with Native Posix Threads, which you get in 2.6 kernels with a suitable libc (and some distros with 2.4 kernels). Check what your program's linked with: on my Fedora Core 3 system `ldd /usr/libexec/mysqld` shows me MySQL is linked with /lib/tls/libc.so.6 and running that shows it has NPTL. The API may be similar but what happens in the kernel isn't and it makes a big, big difference to MySQL. Still, Linux now has fast native POSIX threads and it looks like OS X doesn't.
ikruusa - Saturday, September 3, 2005 - link
Indeed, as mentioned previously there was some mistakes in gcc options. And SIMD optimization is really basic in 4.0.x - only certain loops can be vectorized automatically. But loops around arrays are most significant part in signal processing and that is where SIMD really matters :)As we know for NetBurst arch it is recommended to use XMM registers (that is registers for SSE/SSE2) for FP calculations. And that is what gcc 3.x does (4.x too): -mfpmath=sse triggers all x87 stuff to run as scalar math using SSE command-set. As I know AltiVec is SIMD unit which is smoothly added to PowerPC pipeline. How useful there is scalar math instead of usual FP - I have no idea.
What I want to say - my opinion is that if MySQL team has something to say about compiler options then they have documents about it. Using SIMD style processing in DB engine is very challenging exercise for coders. Dont expect magic from compiler here. Hint: maybe Intel's own icc compiler provide some magic but you have to prove it ;) I still believe that the most useful options can be -O[2,3] -funroll-loops and -ffast-math (as you mentioned) with -arch=[processor]. The last one should provide basic branching elimination (e.g. using cmov for x86) and correct instr. ordering.
About testing Linux. I have some skills in Apache testing with JMeter. I have been quite stuck but kernel developers were kind enough to help: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m...">http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m...
Then I discovered all OS tuning possibilities in /proc Well, most are still unknown for me but I just want to get your attention here. Oracle talks about shared memory and number of semaphores and some particular Linux /proc parameters. Of course there should be all written in MySQL manual too if any parameter needs tuning. But is it enough to read MySQL manual and create profile for OS'es IPC and process management if we need to stress test MySQL on e.g 8-way SMP?
But still - good start of interesting investigation, anandtech.com!! Thank you and keep going!
kvs - Saturday, September 3, 2005 - link
If thread-creation is extremely slow in Darwin, maybe MySQL-performance could be helped by enabled the thread cache? A look at 'mysqladmin extended-status' would show how many threads had been created and cached, and should reveal if thread_cache would be needed.tester2 - Friday, September 2, 2005 - link
Well if ab on Mac OS X was the problem you could have easily tested this from a Linux box over the network.Because you probably did this as well, and found out that performance tuning done by Apple outperformed the Linux/PPC and Linux/Opteron system by a substantial amount you keept this out of the story ...
So I did some testing, and yes when using ab from a Mac OS X I find the exact figures you report. Using a Linux Pentium 4 based system over Gb network gave me 6150 req/sec substantially faster then anything out there.
Look here for numbers from another source; http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1637655,00.as...">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1637655,00.as...
The webserver runs around 60 threads ... go figure.
Yes there is a problem with the Mac OS X - Mysql combo if you are looking for performance, but jugging this as Mac OS X for server applications is a nono is drawing the wrong conclusion. I hope someone with good development skills will look at the mysql code and tune it to work well with Mac OS X.
benh - Friday, September 2, 2005 - link
Interesting article ! One thing that is worth looking into however is wether the YDL kernel is actually a 32 or a 64 bits kernel. This would probably have an impact on some of the numbers. I would expect the ppc64 kernel to perform faster overall on a 64 bits CPU with a small overhead on syscalls from 32 bits applications due to the argument size translation.Also, the problem with the 2.7Ghz on linux is indeed a slight change in the firmware. It in fact looks like a bug in Apple Open Firmware device tree on those machine where they left out the properties providing the interrupt routing of the i2c controller in the north bridge used to drive the fan controller among others. The OS X driver silently falls back to a polled mecanism, while the linux driver doesn't and (shame on me!) used to have a small bug that would cause it crash when unable to locate those properties.
I posted a patch a while ago fixing that up, I would expect YDL to have an updated kernel/installer available by now.
Finally, you are right about the U3 northbridge having a quite high memory latency, that is definitely not helping the G5. There have been rumours floating around that Apple now has a new bridge that improves that significantly, though it's pretty much impossible to tell if/when they will release a machine using it. IBM also had multicore G5s available for some time now, though Apple is still not releasing any machine using them.
Regards,
Ben.
JohanAnandtech - Friday, September 2, 2005 - link
Thanks for the very helpful feedback.Do you have any idea why the U3 came with such high latency. Lack of development time? Lack of expertise? A inherent problem with the FSB of the G5? Rather old technology? You see I am very curious, and couldn't find much info on it.
benh - Friday, September 2, 2005 - link
I don't know for sure. I wouldn't blame the FSB though. I remember reading somewhere that the memory controller in U3 was similar if not identical to the old one they used in U2 on G4 machines and was to blame but I can't guarantee the reliability of that information.