Bazsi's blog

As posted on the mailing list already, I’m planning to turn syslog-ng into a fully-multi-threaded application in order to improve performance on multi-core systems. Since I don’t want to start destaibilizing 3.2 (rather to push dub that as stable soon), this will become part of OSE 3.3.

During my holidays I’ve worked a little on this to get some actual numbers how much it improves performance. Thus I’ve added the bare-bones of threading to all input/output state machines, which were previously all running in the same “main” thread.

The code is _very_ experimental, it wouldn’t work with more than a single client, but this already shows that using a single client and a single destination file, it gives us about 50% performance boost. On my development laptop with X and every desktop shinyness running, it increased performance of syslog-ng from about 65k/sec to 100k/sec with flow control disabled and 90k/sec with flow control enabled. (the extra 10k was probably dropped without flow control because the output thread was probably slower writing out the stuff to disk, but I’m not sure).

If anyone wants to see what I’ve done so far, here is the commit:

http://git.balabit.hu/?p=bazsi/syslog-ng-3.2.git;a=shortlog;h=multi-thread