Dear all,

I've spent my afternoon running some benchmarks to see if MQ patches would
degrade performance in the "normal case".

To measure performance I've used the latest lmbench and I have mesured the
kernel compile times on a dual pentium III box runing at 1GHz with an 133MHz
bus.

Results (attached) show that there is no measurable difference in performace
between a vanilla scheduler and a multiqueue scheduler when running only few
processes (the compilation benchmark runs essentially two processes, one per
CPU).

I have measured the HP and not the "scalability" patch because the two do more
or less the same thing and give me the same performance advantages, but the
former is a lot simpler and I could port it with no effort on any recent
kernel. It is indeed interesting to see that this patch was originally designed
for a 2.4.0-test10 kernel, and still works fine on the latest kernels, only a
minor change (one line) was required. A version of the patch for the 2.4.2-ac26
kernel is attached to this message.

Given the zero impact on "normal case" performance and the huge positive impact
(> 20%) in the heavy load case (70-80 runnable processess on a load of about
1400 total) I don't see why such a thing shouldn't be accepted in the
mainstream scheduler.

 - Fabio