What is the Context Switch Time for IRIX?
There are ubiquitous context switch benchmarks available that demonstrate a wide variety of results over a wide variety of constraints, conditions and CPU speeds. One benchmark, for which code can be provided, produces the following results for context switches between two processes (NOT threads) on an Origin 2000 system running on an isolated 180MHz MIPS R10000 CPU under IRIX 6.5.10f: NUMBER OF CONTEXT SWITCHES = 500000 LONGEST CONTEXT SWITCH TIME = 30.000000 usecs AVERAGE CONTEXT SWITCH TIME = 19.867220 usecs On an Origin3000 system running on an isolated 400MHz MIPS R12000 CPU under IRIX 6.5.10f: NUMBER OF CONTEXT SWITCHES = 500000 LONGEST CONTEXT SWITCH TIME = 14.000000 usecs AVERAGE CONTEXT SWITCH TIME = 9.627840 usecs The basic algorithm is as follows: process A starts, blocks process B starts, unblocks process A takes a timestamp and blocks process A awakes, takes a timestamp, unblocks process B and blocks repeat for n iterations Please note that the numbers above are an example
