Date:	Mon, 16 Apr 2007 02:43:00 +1000
From:	Con Kolivas <kernel@...ivas.org>
To:	Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@...izon.net>
Cc:	"Pekka Enberg" <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
	"hui Bill Huey" <billh@...ppy.monkey.org>,
	"Ingo Molnar" <mingo@...e.hu>, "ck list" <ck@....kolivas.org>,
	"Peter Williams" <pwil3058@...pond.net.au>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	"Linus Torvalds" <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"Andrew Morton" <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"Nick Piggin" <npiggin@...e.de>, "Mike Galbraith" <efault@....de>,
	"Arjan van de Ven" <arjan@...radead.org>,
	"Thomas Gleixner" <tglx@...utronix.de>
Subject: Re: [Announce] [patch] Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair  Scheduler [CFS]

On Monday 16 April 2007 01:16, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 15 April 2007, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> >On 4/15/07, hui Bill Huey <billh@...ppy.monkey.org> wrote:
> >> The perception here is that there is that there is this expectation that
> >> sections of the Linux kernel are intentionally "churn squated" to
> >> prevent any other ideas from creeping in other than of the owner of that
> >> subsytem
> >
> >Strangely enough, my perception is that Ingo is simply trying to
> >address the issues Mike's testing discovered in RDSL and SD. It's not
> >surprising Ingo made it a separate patch set as Con has repeatedly
> >stated that the "problems" are in fact by design and won't be fixed.
>
> I won't get into the middle of this just yet, not having decided which dog
> I should bet on yet.  I've been running 2.6.21-rc6 + Con's 0.40 patch for
> about 24 hours, its been generally usable, but gzip still causes lots of 5
> to 10+ second lags when its running.  I'm coming to the conclusion that
> gzip simply doesn't play well with others...

Actually Gene I think you're being bitten here by something I/O bound since 
the cpu usage never tops out. If that's the case and gzip is dumping 
truckloads of writes then you're suffering something that irks me even more 
than the scheduler in linux, and that's how much writes hurt just about 
everything else. Try your testcase with bzip2 instead (since that won't be 
i/o bound), or drop your dirty ratio to as low as possible which helps a 
little bit (5% is the minimum)

echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio

and finally try the braindead noop i/o scheduler as well.

echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

(replace sda with your drive obviously).

I'd wager a big one that's what causes your gzip pain. If it wasn't for the 
fact that I've decided to all but give up ever trying to provide code for 
mainline again, trying my best to make writes hurt less on linux would be my 
next big thing [tm]. 

Oh and for the others watching, (points to vm hackers) I found a bug when 
playing with the dirty ratio code. If you modify it to allow it drop below 5% 
but still above the minimum in the vm code, stalls happen somewhere in the vm 
where nothing much happens for sometimes 20 or 30 seconds worst case 
scenario. I had to drop a patch in 2.6.19 that allowed the dirty ratio to be 
set ultra low because these stalls were gross.

> Amazing to me, the cpu its using stays generally below 80%, and often below
> 60%, even while the kmail composer has a full sentence in its buffer that
> it still hasn't shown me when I switch to the htop screen to check, and
> back to the kmail screen to see if its updated yet.  The screen switch
> doesn't seem to lag so I don't think renicing x would be helpfull.  Those
> are the obvious lags, and I'll build & reboot to the CFS patch at some
> point this morning (whats left of it that is :).  And report in due time of
> course

-- 
-ck
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