[Pnet-developers] Performance and threads

[Rhys Weatherley]

A number of people have reported performance problems lately that have been 
very puzzling to me because I don't see the same problem here.

Marcus Urban noticed today that turning off threading in pnet seems to 
increase performance quite significantly on RedHat 9.  But his SuSE box is 
fine with threads enabled.  Even on apps that are using only one thread.

The main difference seems to be the NPTL thread library: RH 9 has it and SuSE 
doesn't (yet).  Since I'm running older non-NPTL RedHat and Mandrake systems 
here, I don't see a performance problem.

The long and the short of it is that I need someone to investigate this to try 
to figure out why NPTL has worse performance than non-NPTL.  It could be any 
of a number of things.  You can try swapping in a newer version of libgc.  Or 
fiddling with the signal handling in "pnet/support/pt_defs.c", or the pnet 
monitor implementation.  Or something else.  I really have no idea right now 
what the problem is.

Do I have a volunteer?

Cheers,

Rhys.