[Mono-dev] how to improve mono performance

[Ben Maurer]

On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 23:32 -0800, zhu shi song wrote:
>   I insist that performance is the key factor for key
> applications.  For example, we now have one enterprise
> web query application. Every day between 8:30AM and
> 12:00AM, it serve about 20000 requests.  Now we use
> one P4 2.6G PC Server with 512M DDR running Windows
> 2003 Server, it works well.  If we port it to Linux +
> Mono, we must upgrade the hardware to meet the same
> workload. 

Have you actually ported and measured this? From your previous emails it
sounds like you haven't. Just because something can add doubles N times
faster does not mean that it will be N times faster for your
application. If you'd like us to help you with your application, you are
going to have to do something more than show us issues with our GC and
Register Allocator that we already know about (See Miguel's blog:
http://tirania.org/blog/texts/mono-status.html)

What we need is:

      * Output of --profile from *your application* running on mono
        under realistic load
      * (If possible) The source code to your application (I am sure
        that Miguel could help you if you need an NDA, etc) so that we
        can better understand why some functions show up in the profile

To reiterate: your benchmarks do not help us fix *your* problems, at
least not in the short term.

I'd also point out:

20,000 requests / (3.5 hours) = 1.5 requests / second

Is your server using *all* it's cpu power for 1.5 requests/sec? Maybe
you can make small optimizations in your application which will help it
on either platform (I recently encountered a web application where
submissions were taking 20 seconds each, it turned out that we did not
use indexes correctly in sql server. A little bit of DBA action made
requests take 1 second each). It's often easier to optimize the
application than the platform. This seems like a small price to pay for
the benefit of not having to deal with the latest worm, patch Tuesday
and the general pain of Windows system administration (not to mention
the money one saves from the Windows license!)

-- Ben