Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758861Ab3GRMAu (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Jul 2013 08:00:50 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:27972 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757183Ab3GRMAt (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Jul 2013 08:00:49 -0400 Message-ID: <51E7D89A.8010009@redhat.com> Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 07:59:22 -0400 From: Rik van Riel User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130402 Thunderbird/17.0.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Peter Zijlstra CC: Jason Low , Ingo Molnar , LKML , Mike Galbraith , Thomas Gleixner , Paul Turner , Alex Shi , Preeti U Murthy , Vincent Guittot , Morten Rasmussen , Namhyung Kim , Andrew Morton , Kees Cook , Mel Gorman , aswin@hp.com, scott.norton@hp.com, chegu_vinod@hp.com Subject: Re: [RFC] sched: Limit idle_balance() when it is being used too frequently References: <20130716202015.GX17211@twins.programming.kicks-ass.net> <1374014881.2332.21.camel@j-VirtualBox> <20130717072504.GY17211@twins.programming.kicks-ass.net> <1374048701.6000.21.camel@j-VirtualBox> <20130717093913.GP23818@dyad.programming.kicks-ass.net> <1374076741.7412.35.camel@j-VirtualBox> <20130717161815.GR23818@dyad.programming.kicks-ass.net> <51E6D9B7.1030705@redhat.com> <20130717180156.GS23818@dyad.programming.kicks-ass.net> <1374120144.1816.45.camel@j-VirtualBox> <20130718093218.GH27075@twins.programming.kicks-ass.net> In-Reply-To: <20130718093218.GH27075@twins.programming.kicks-ass.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1535 Lines: 36 On 07/18/2013 05:32 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 09:02:24PM -0700, Jason Low wrote: > >> I ran a few AIM7 workloads for the 8 socket HT enabled case and I needed >> to set N to more than 20 in order to get the big performance gains. >> >> One thing that I thought of was to have N be based on how often idle >> balance attempts does not pull task(s). >> >> For example, N can be calculated based on the number of idle balance >> attempts for the CPU since the last "successful" idle balance attempt. >> So if the previous 30 idle balance attempts resulted in no tasks moved, >> then n = 30 / 5. So idle balance gets less time to run as the number of >> unneeded idle balance attempts increases, and thus N will not be set too >> high during situations where idle balancing is "successful" more often. >> Any comments on this idea? > > It would be good to get a solid explanation for why we need such high N. > But yes that might work. I have some idea, though no proof :) I suspect a lot of the idle balancing time is spent waiting for and acquiring the runqueue locks of remote CPUs. If we spend half our idle time causing contention to remote runqueue locks, we could be a big factor in keeping those other CPUs from getting work done. -- All rights reversed -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/