The Pros & Cons of Hyperthreading

By Jeffry Schwartz | Advice

Aug 13

— By Jeff Schwartz

Hyperthreading is one of those features that most IT personnel have heard about, but many do not understand exactly what it does or why it may improve or degrade the performance of their servers. Although hyperthreaded processors have been available for many years, the confusion surrounding it is as commonplace today as it was when the technology was introduced in 2002. Server, processor, and motherboard manufacturers have contributed to the confusion by activating the feature by default for several years after it was introduced, then deactivating it by default for a few years, and recently by activating it again by default. In addition, for many years, determining whether it was on or off could be accomplished only by reviewing the BIOS settings during a reboot, which is extremely difficult to schedule for most production servers.

What is Hyperthreading?

Hyperthreading involves having two distinct pipelines into a single processor execution core. Research into code sequences showed that code executing on a processor frequently, and naturally, pauses because of things such as main memory fetches into the processor cache and improper code branch prediction. The rationale is to provide the execution portion of an idling core processor with work to do while these kinds of activities are handled. These two pipelines are presented to the outside world as two distinct processors: one physical and one “logical.” Therefore, as far as any operating system is concerned, twice as many processors are available when hyperthreading is active compared to when it is not.

Why not use it all the time?

In theory, utilizing available processor cycles is a great idea and therefore, this mechanism should be used all the time. However, in practice, some problems arise. Two main issues are involved: processor schedulers and the length of time a unit of work stays on a processor without interruption. Since the execution portion of a processor is still a single entity, scheduling appropriately is critically important, i.e., two threads from the same process should NOT be scheduled on the same core. If they are, each thread will take turns stopping the other and this degrades performance. The difficulty, particularly in the SQL Server environment, is that SQL Server schedules its own threads and depending upon the SQL Server version as well as the Windows version on which it is running, SQL Server may or may not be aware of the physical/logical distinction or know how to handle this distinction properly. Therefore, there is a good chance that it may schedule two dependent threads on the same core. The other issue is that a large or parallelized SQL Server query threads usually consume their full time allotment on a processor before they are suspended. Any thread sitting in the other pipe of a hyperthreaded processor will wait the full time before it is allowed to run again. If that thread is from the same query, the two threads will stop each other from running and make the query run substantially longer. Therefore, under normal conditions, most SQL Server customers do not benefit from employing hyperthreading.

One type of workload, high volume small transaction processing, DOES benefit from hyperthreading, but even then it does not benefit as much as one might expect. Benchmarks and actual user experiences have demonstrated that at most, a 30 percent gain can be obtained when transactions are extremely small, e.g., they execute in under 200 milliseconds. Therefore, if a server only handles small high volume transactions regardless of whether they are inquiry, insert, or update, it will benefit from hyperthreading. As soon as any large queries arrive at the server, the benefit is gone and the problems cited in the previous paragraph arise.

How can I tell whether Hyperthreading is active?

Historically, this has been difficult to determine, but in the past few years, Windows and WMI have improved to provide this information without interrogating the BIOS. Older versions did not provide adequate or accurate information, but beginning with Windows 2008, the information is quite useful. This results from the fact that older versions of Windows either did not know or report the physical/logical processor distinction. The following PowerShell (other languages that can access WMI will work also) commands provide the necessary information. The first command returns the number of sockets on the system followed by the number of logical processors, and the second command returns information regarding the processors themselves. The first output was obtained on a quad-core single-socket system with hyperthreading turned off, and the second output was obtained from the same system with hyperthreading turned on. Clearly, the number of logical processors doubles when hyperthreading is turned on.

gwmi win32_computersystem | fl NumberOfProcessors, NumberOfLogicalProcessors

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Conclusion

Hyperthreading can be useful in a SQL Server environment if the workload is comprised solely of extremely lightweight transactions. Under these conditions, the most one can expect to obtain from hyperthreading is a 30 percent improvement. If the server is running the latest versions of Windows and SQL Server, it may be possible to obtain some improvement for workloads that are highly transactional with a few small reports mixed in. However, in most SQL Server environments, hyperthreading will most likely degrade performance.

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