[Pkg-openldap-devel] Bug#421946: openldap2.3: build against newer Berkeley DB

[Howard Chu]

Clint Adams wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 11:23:22PM -0700, Howard Chu wrote:
>> The test I used most recently was to run test008 in the OpenLDAP test suite 
>> and average the runtimes over 5-10 runs for each BDB version. In my tests I 
>> ran with SLAPD_DEBUG=0 so the only I/O traffic is from BDB and not from 
>> debug logging. I also ran with an extremely small cachesize setting (5, the 
>> default is 1000) to further aggravate the locking contention in the 
>> underlying DB. Under normal conditions (where the cache is not so 
>> ridiculously undersized for the workload) the differences are not as 
>> apparent.
>>
>> Also note that the runtimes for this test are non-deterministic since they 
>> are affected by deadlock retries, and their pattern is unpredictable on 
>> most systems.
> 
> Does the hybrid mutex performance fix in db 4.6.21 solve this problem?

I've just rerun my tests using both BDB 4.2.52 and 4.6.21 and the behavior is 
as expected. On an otherwise idle machine, both perform well, completing our 
concurrency test in about 31 seconds.

With a CPU-hog running in the background, the test with BDB 4.2.52 takes only 
37 seconds, while BDB 4.6.21 takes 1:42. Watching with top you can see that 
BDB 4.6.21 gets a lot less CPU than BDB 4.2.52. This is the problem with using 
yield() on an NPTL system - whereas on most POSIX systems yield() only yields 
control to some other thread in the current process, on NPTL yield() gives up 
the CPU for the entire process.
-- 
   -- Howard Chu
   Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
   Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
   Chief Architect, OpenLDAP     http://www.openldap.org/project/