[comp.unix.internals] shared memory -- benchmarks, measurements

emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti) (03/05/91)

I'm looking for some guidance on measuring the performance of a system
which seems to have a lot of contention for a piece of (system V
style) shared memory.

First help would be any sort of shared memory benchmarks that anyone
has so that I could get reasonable quantifiable numbers on shared
memory performance (i.e. something to convince me that operations on a
Decstation 5000 are nn% faster than on a Dec 3100).  A look through
Eugene Miya's benchmarking list didn't yield anything obvious, but if
some piece of a bigger benchmark suite has some tools that would help
quite a bit.

Are there tools better than ipcs(1) for examining the usage of shared
memory?  Nothing obvious shows up along the lines of vmstat, netstat,
iostat et al.  

Thanks as usual for any help.

-- 
Edward Vielmetti
emv@ox.com

mah@dec1.wu-wien.ac.at (Michael Haberler) (03/12/91)

In article <EMV.91Mar4113610@poe.aa.ox.com>, emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti) writes:
|> 
|> I'm looking for some guidance on measuring the performance of a system
|> which seems to have a lot of contention for a piece of (system V
|> style) shared memory.

I'd watch for behaviour of programs with several shared memory segmments
attached. On some architectures, there's an upper limit on how many 
segments are actually attached, and if more than that number of segments
are used, they are detached and reattached by the kernel on the fly -
with page faults and a kernel trap. That can mean a big difference in
performance.

I could imagine that that limit might be decreased by the use of
shared libraries.

- michael