lock contention - what can we do about it?

[Alexander Shaduri]

Hello,

On Sat, 5 Mar 2011 20:17:35 +0100
Milian Wolff wrote:

> David Nolden, 05.03.2011:
> > If the CPU time is below 100%, then that's for sure not due to lock
> > contention, but simply due to I/O. Either repeat the test with the
> > disk-cache better filled, or increase the number of threads.
> 
> If that would be the case, wouldn't iotop show lots of disk access? And top's 
> %wa would be high, but it's rarely more than 2% for me (wa is iowait time).

I may be totally wrong here, but could you not use tmpfs or something
like that for the files in question to rule out I/O bottleneck?

Cheers,
Alexander