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Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] /proc/stat: Reduce irqs counting performance overhead
To:     Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>,
        Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
        Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>,
        Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>,
        Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>,
        Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
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From:   Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
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Organization: Red Hat
Message-ID: <56954b42-4258-7268-53b5-ddca28758193@redhat.com>
Date:   Tue, 8 Jan 2019 11:58:26 -0500
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On 01/07/2019 09:04 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 07, 2019 at 05:41:39PM -0500, Waiman Long wrote:
>> On 01/07/2019 05:32 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jan 07, 2019 at 10:12:56AM -0500, Waiman Long wrote:
>>>> As newer systems have more and more IRQs and CPUs available in their
>>>> system, the performance of reading /proc/stat frequently is getting
>>>> worse and worse.
>>> Because the "roll-your-own" per-cpu counter implementaiton has been
>>> optimised for low possible addition overhead on the premise that
>>> summing the counters is rare and isn't a performance issue. This
>>> patchset is a direct indication that this "summing is rare and can
>>> be slow" premise is now invalid.
>>>
>>> We have percpu counter infrastructure that trades off a small amount
>>> of addition overhead for zero-cost reading of the counter value.
>>> i.e. why not just convert this whole mess to percpu_counters and
>>> then just use percpu_counter_read_positive()? Then we just don't
>>> care how often userspace reads the /proc file because there is no
>>> summing involved at all...
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Dave.
>> Yes, percpu_counter_read_positive() is cheap. However, you still need to
>> pay the price somewhere. In the case of percpu_counter, the update is
>> more expensive.
> Ummm, that's exactly what I just said. It's a percpu counter that
> solves the "sum is expensive and frequent" problem, just like you
> are encountering here. I do not need basic scalability algorithms
> explained to me.

What I am trying to say is that the "sum is expensive and frequent" is
only true of a very small percentage of applications. It is not true for
most of them. I am hesitating to add latency to the interrupt path that
will affect all applications.
 
>> I would say the percentage of applications that will hit this problem is
>> small. But for them, this problem has some significant performance overhead.
> Well, duh!
>
> What I was suggesting is that you change the per-cpu counter
> implementation to the /generic infrastructure/ that solves this
> problem, and then determine if the extra update overhead is at all
> measurable. If you can't measure any difference in update overhead,
> then slapping complexity on the existing counter to attempt to
> mitigate the summing overhead is the wrong solution.
>
> Indeed, it may be that you need o use a custom batch scaling curve
> for the generic per-cpu coutner infrastructure to mitigate the
> update overhead, but the fact is we already have generic
> infrastructure that solves your problem and so the solution should
> be "use the generic infrastructure" until it can be proven not to
> work.
>
> i.e. prove the generic infrastructure is not fit for purpose and
> cannot be improved sufficiently to work for this use case before
> implementing a complex, one-off snowflake counter implementation...

I see your point. I like the deferred summation approach that I am
currently using. If I have to modify the current per-cpu counter
implementation to support that and I probably need to add counter
grouping support to amortize the overhead, that can be a major
undertaking. This is not a high priority item for me at the moment, so I
may have to wait until I have some spare time left.

Thanks,
Longman