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Re: pthreads don't scale on windows xp, but does scale on linux, cygwin 1.5.19


At 07:00 PM 3/21/2006, you wrote:

jdeifik wrote:
I have a dual xeon 2.4ghz machine with hypertreading enabled.
This gives me 4 logical processors.
The machine dual boots to windows xp sp2, and linux.
I have a highly parallelizable program I wrote, and I tested it running 1 to 8 threads,
running with no source changes on windows and linux.
Here is the performance on linux using gcc-3.4.3
threads
1 1436.41user 0.10system 7:16.37elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
2 436.00user 0.02system 3:38.15elapsed 199%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
3 369.15user 0.05system 2:03.48elapsed 298%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
4 359.77user 0.08system 1:42.95elapsed 349%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
6 357.83user 0.09system 1:40.94elapsed 354%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
8 358.79user 0.06system 1:41.80elapsed 352%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
To compute efficiency, take the single thread elapsed time/(# threads * threaded elapsed time)
There is virtually perfect scaling. 4 processors scale with an efficiency of about 103%.
For 6 and 8 threads, efficiency goes up a small amount.


Here is the performance on windows xp using cygwin pthreads and gcc-3.4.4
1 434.60user 0.20system 7:16.47elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 509696maxresident)k
2 441.78user 0.24system 3:42.06elapsed 199%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 510208maxresident)k
3 579.68user 0.15system 3:14.50elapsed 298%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 511232maxresident)k
4 675.39user 0.15system 2:51.50elapsed 393%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 512000maxresident)k
6 711.70user 0.18system 3:01.20elapsed 392%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 511488maxresident)k
8 683.35user 0.21system 2:56.05elapsed 388%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 512000maxresident)k
Things are fine for 2 threads, scaling with an efficiency of 96%
For 3 threads, scaling efficiency is 73%
For 4 threads, scaling efficiency is 62%
For 6 threads, scaling efficiency is 39%
For 8 threads, scaling efficiency is 30%

Windows doesn't have HT aware scheduling, such as recent linux schedulers incorporate. Cygwin doesn't attempt to improve on the Windows scheduler. I won't ask for relevant details about your linux, or how you managed to write a program which doesn't deliver close to full performance at 2 threads, as that would take this even further Off Topic. However, if you are getting good scaling to 2 threads, that should enable you to get all the dual processor performance you can expect in Windows for practical purposes. You might try repeating your tests with HT disabled in BIOS.

My linux is mandrake 10.2, I suspect running kernel 2.6.11-13smp.
My program scales perfectly at 2 threads on linux. It also scales perfectly at 4 threads on linux.
The problem isn't with my program.


I am not sure why it is important to have a HT aware scheduler for Windows, when there are 4 or more
threads. I can see with 2 threads you would like to have one per physical processor.
With 4 or more threads, cygwin phtreads really sucks, 4->62%, 6->39%, 8->30% efficiency.


It seems to me that more and more apps are turning to threading for performance,
and more and more hardware is available with multi-processor, multi-core, and multi-threading.


Jeff Deifik


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