On 07/27/2012 01:18 PM, Seth Jennings wrote:
> Some benchmarking numbers demonstrating the I/O saving that can be had
> with zcache:
> 
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/22/383

There was concern that kernel changes external to zcache since v3.3 may
have mitigated the benefit of zcache.  So I re-ran my kernel building
benchmark and confirmed that zcache is still providing I/O and runtime
savings.

Gentoo w/ kernel v3.5 (frontswap only, cleancache disabled)
Quad-core i5-2500 @ 3.3GHz
512MB DDR3 1600MHz (limited with mem=512m on boot)
Filesystem and swap on 80GB HDD (about 58MB/s with hdparm -t)
majflt are major page faults reported by the time command
pswpin/out is the delta of pswpin/out from /proc/vmstat before and after
the make -jN

Mind the 512MB RAM vs 1GB in my previous results.  This just reduces
the number of threads required to create memory pressure and removes some
of the context switching noise from the results.

I'm also using a single HDD instead of the RAID0 in my previous results.

Each run started with with:
swapoff -a
swapon -a
sync
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

I/O (in pages):
        normal                          zcache                          change
N       pswpin  pswpout majflt  I/O sum pswpin  pswpout majflt  I/O sum %I/O
4       0       2       2116    2118    0       0       2125    2125    0%
8       0       575     2244    2819    4       4       2219    2227    21%
12      2543    4038    3226    9807    1748    2519    3871    8138    17%
16      23926   47278   9426    80630   8252    15598   9372    33222   59%
20      50307   127797  15039   193143  20224   40634   17975   78833   59%

Runtime (in seconds):
N       normal  zcache  %change
4       126     127     -1%
8       124     124     0%
12      131     133     -2%
16      189     156     17%
20      261     235     10%

%CPU utilization (out of 400% on 4 cpus)
N       normal  zcache  %change
4       254     253     0%
8       261     263     -1%
12      250     248     1%
16      173     211     -22%
20      124     140     -13%

There is a sweet spot at 16 threads, where zcache is improving runtime by
17% and reducing I/O by 59% (185MB) using 22% more CPU.

Seth

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