Towards understanding application performance and system behavior with the full dynticks feature

The full dynticks feature also known as adaptive-ticks is a relatively new feature released in the Linux kernel since kernel version 3.10. Previous research studies have attempted to understand the effect of this feature on system latency and to some extent on power consumption. However, a comprehensive investigation on the impact of full dynticks feature on the system behavior and application performance have yet to be fully understood. This paper provides intensive performance analysis of the full dynticks feature under different workloads. It also presents the key findings of the factors that influence the performance of the full dynticks feature. Our research work has primarily focused on demystifying the design of the full dynticks feature and analyzing the system behavior using open source benchmarking tools. We analyzed the architecture of the full dynticks kernel in comparison with the dynticks-idle kernel by conducting intensive benchmarking to investigate application behavior for systems employing this feature. Benchmark results show that full dynticks feature positively affects applications performance with different types of workloads showing varying levels of improvement.