Performance Measurements of a Multiprocessor Sprite Kernel.
John H. Hartman, John K. Ousterhout · 1990
This report presents performance measurements made of the Sprite operating system running on a multiprocessor. A variety of micro- and macro-benchmarks were run while varying the number of processors in the system, and both the elapsed time and the contention for kernel locks were recorded. A number of interesting conclusions are drawn from the results. First, the macro-benchmarks show acceptable performance on systems of up to five processors. Total system throughput increases almost linearly with the system size. Projections of the lock contention measurements show that the maximum performance will be reached with about seven processors in the system. Second, it is often difficult to predict the effect of a benchmark on particular kernel locks. It was anticipated that different benchmarks would saturate different kernel monitor locks. After running the benchmarks it was found that a single master lock was the biggest kernel bottleneck, and that one of the micro-benchmarks had saturat...