Context switches much slower in new linux kernels
- by Michael Goldshteyn
We are looking to upgrade the OS on our servers from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Unfortunately, it seems that the latency to run a thread that has become runnable has significantly increased from the 2.6 kernel to the 3.2 kernel. In fact the latency numbers we are getting are hard to believe.
Let me be more specific about the test. We have a program that has two threads. The first thread gets the current time (in ticks using RDTSC) and then signals a condition variable once a second. The second thread waits on the condition variable and wakes up when it is signaled. It then gets the current time (in ticks using RDTSC). The difference between the time in the second thread and the time in the first thread is computed and displayed on the console. After this the second thread waits on the condition variable once more. So, we get a thread to thread signaling latency measurement once a second as a result.
In linux 2.6.32, this latency is somewhere on the order of 2.8-3.5 us, which is reasonable. In linux 3.2.0, this latency is somewhere on the order of 40-100 us. I have excluded any differences in hardware between the two host hosts. They run on identical hardware (dual socket X5687 {Westmere-EP} processors running at 3.6 GHz with hyperthreading, speedstep and all C states turned off). We are changing the affinity to run both threads on physical cores of the same socket (i.e., the first thread is run on Core 0 and the second thread is run on Core 1), so there is no bouncing of threads on cores or bouncing/communication between sockets.
The only difference between the two hosts is that one is running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with kernel 2.6.32-28 (the fast context switch box) and the other is running the latest Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with kernel 3.2.0-23 (the slow context switch box).
Have there been any changes in the kernel that could account for this ridiculous slow down in how long it takes for a thread to be scheduled to run?
