Re: Any conclusion on the Xeon context-switching issue?

["Jeffrey W. Baker" <jwbaker(at)acm(dot)org>]

On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 16:54 +0000, Richard Huxton wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > Richard Huxton <dev(at)archonet(dot)com> writes:
> >> Subject says it all really. I've got a new client who seems to be
> >> suffering from it, and I'm not sure if any conclusion was reached.
> > 
> > What's he using?  8.1 seems to have alleviated the problem somewhat,
> > and I've done more work in CVS tip.  It'll never go away entirely,
> > because these chips are just not very good at sharing memory, but
> > we've certainly reduced it quite a bit from where it was in 7.x.
> 
> 7.4.12 (.12 as of last week). I've seen context-switching peak at 80000 
> on a quad-Xeon that really shouldn't be straining.

Is this causing an actual problem, or do you just like to see lower
numbers under the cs column?  Certainly many people have asked about
this issue but few have pointed to application-level performance
problems that may have resulted.

-jwb