Effect of CPU Powersave mode on Sysbench benchmarks

When I started analysing the various patches that I had made
for improving the MySQL Server performance I did by mistake
forget to turn cpuspeed off in Linux. This is a feature that
makes it possible to run the CPU's on a much lower frequency
in cases when they aren't so heavily used.

So at first I considered simply turning it on and forgetting the
data I had produced. Then I realised that actually to have
cpuspeed activated is the default behaviour and for many
servers out there in the world it is actually the best mode since
most servers goes from high load to low load frequently.

So I decided that it would be worthwhile to analyse behaviour
both with and without this feature turned on.

The cpuspeed feature was particularly involved when running
sysbench on a different server, so thus using a socket based
communication. In this case the performance drop off at
64,128 and 256 threads were fairly significant. However the
performance drop off when I added fixes for LOCK_open,
LOCK_alarm and LOCK_threadcount was very significant. I
got 50% better performance with these patches when
cpuspeed was activated and I was running sysbench over the
network.

When I ran sysbench and mysqld on the same host the impact
of the patches and cpuspeed was smaller but still significant.
Turning cpuspeed on decreases the performance of sysbench
readwrite by almost 10% for the baseline (MySQL 5.4.3) whereas
with the patches that fixes the LOCK_* problems the drop in
using cpuspeed is only 1%.

So it seems like having many extra mutexes to pass through
doesn't hurt performance so much when running at full CPU
speed all the time, but as soon as the CPU power save mode
is activated these many extra mutexes to pass through has a
significant negative effect.