Paper

Paper: Scalability by Design - Coding for Systems With Large CPU Counts

Todd Hoff

The multi-cores are coming and software designed for fewer cores usually doesn't work on more cores without substantial redesign. For a taste of the issues take a look at No new global mutexes! (and how to make the thread/connection pool work), which shows some of the difficulties of making MySQL perform on SMP servers.

In this paper, Richard Smith, a –Staff Engineer at Sun, goes into some nice detail on multi-core issues. His take home lessons are:

  • Use fine-grained locking or lock-free strategy
  • Document the strategy, including correctness
    criteria (invariants)
  • Keep critical sections short
  • Profile the code at both light and heavy load
  • Collect HW performance counter data
  • Identify bottleneck resource (there's always at least one!)
  • Eliminate or ameliorate it

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