From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu May 16 07:34:30 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id HAA07931 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 16 May 1996 07:34:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dyson.iquest.net (dyson.iquest.net [198.70.144.127]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id HAA07924; Thu, 16 May 1996 07:34:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from root@localhost) by dyson.iquest.net (8.7.5/8.6.9) id JAA13613; Thu, 16 May 1996 09:33:15 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" Message-Id: <199605161433.JAA13613@dyson.iquest.net> Subject: Re: EDO & Memory latency To: babkin@hq.icb.chel.su (Serge A. Babkin) Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 09:33:15 -0500 (EST) Cc: dyson@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199605160907.PAA10321@hq.icb.chel.su> from "Serge A. Babkin" at May 16, 96 03:07:44 pm Reply-To: dyson@freebsd.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > > You likely are seeing TLB overhead intrinsic to the processor. Some processors > > don't have microcode TLB management, and you'll see worse numbers, because the > > TLB needs to be handled in normal machine/assembly code. (Of course, on those > > processors, you can tune the TLB management more freely.) > > But I tried to run it on Pentium that has microcode implementation of TLB. > What I was implying above was that R4400 (approx the same speed in general as a fast pentium) was taking 2usecs, while the Pentium takes 400usecs (on my machine). Paging isn't the issue, it is TLB updates and propagation through the glue and cache to main memory. R4400's don't handle the TLB in microcode, and the Pentium does. This is one of the *big* suprises that people sometimes find out -- those TLB updates do make a difference. I had a customer whose application was running several times slower on a R4400 box than expected. It was due to clashing with the TLB update policy. We reorganized the code, and the performance went up higher than expectations!!! If you caused your system to page, that is because there were other pages in the system that the VM system deemed to be higher priority, or you were simply out of memory. John