Patent ID: 7080375
Filing Date: 2006-07-18
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A method for reducing contention of a highly contended dispatcher lock protecting data items of a dispatcher database of an operating system for a multi-processor computer system, said method comprising the steps of: forming one or more dispatch groups including any of threads, resources, and events that frequently interact with each other; creating N local locks, one for each dispatch group, where N≧2; relating each dispatchable object to its dispatch group; modifying the locking requirements of all code paths of the one or more code paths of the operating system so that the local locks being acquired and released in each of said all code paths are those associated with dispatchable objects touching the code paths; evaluating the operating system after said modifying the locking requirements so as to determine if the overall performance of the operating system is acceptable based upon user-selected criteria; when overall performance of the operating system is unacceptable, counting usage of all the code paths to determine a heaviest path, wherein the heaviest path has a highest usage; and remodifying the heaviest code path.