Date:	Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:39:36 -0400
From:	Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...ymtl.ca>
To:	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
Cc:	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@...rix.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] tracing: move __DO_TRACE out of line

* Jeremy Fitzhardinge (jeremy@...p.org) wrote:
> Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
>> Here is the conclusions I gather from the following tbench tests on the LTTng
>> tree :
>>
>> - Dormant tracepoints, when sprinkled all over the place, have a very small, but
>>   measurable, footprint on kernel stress-test workloads (3 % for the
>>   whole 2.6.30-rc1 LTTng tree).
>>
>> - "Immediate values" help lessening this impact significantly (3 % -> 2.5 %).
>>
>> - Static jump patching would diminish impact even more, but would require gcc
>>   modifications to be acceptable. I did some prototypes using instruction
>>   pattern matching in the past which was judged too complex.
>>
>> - I strongly recommend adding per-subsystem config-out option for heavy
>>   users like kmemtrace or pvops. Compiling-out kmemtrace instrumentation
>>   brings the performance impact from 2.5 % down to 1.9 % slowdown.
>>
>> - Putting the tracepoint out-of-line is a no-go, as it slows down *both* the
>>   dormant (3 % -> 4.7 %) and the active (+20% to tracer overhead) tracepoints
>>   compared to inline tracepoints.
>>   
>
> That's an interestingly counter-intuitive result.  Do you have any  
> theories how this might happen?  The only mechanism I can think of is  
> that, because the inline code sections are smaller, gcc is less inclined  
> to put the if(unlikely) code out of line, so the amount of hot-patch  
> code is higher.  But still, 1.7% is a massive increase in overhead,  
> especially compared to the relative differences of the other changes.
>

Hrm, there is an approximation I've done in my test code to minimize the
development time, and it might explain it. I have simplistically changed the

static inline
for
static noinline

in DECLARE_TRACE(), and have not modified DEFINE_TRACE. Therefore,
some duplicated instances of the function are defined. We should clearly
re-do those tests with your approach of extern prototype in the
DECLARE_TRACE and add proto and args arguments to DEFINE_TRACE, where
the callback would be declared. I'd be very interested to see the
result. For a limited instrumentation modification, one could
concentrate on kmemtrace instrumentation, given I've shown that cover
enough sites that its performance impact, under tbench, seems to be
consistently perceivable.

However I have very limited time on my hands, and I won't be able to do
the modification required to test this in the LTTng setup applied to all
the instrumentation. I also don't have the hardware and cpu time to
perform the 10 runs of each you are talking about, given that the 3 runs
already monopolized my development machine for way too long.

Mathieu, who really has to focus back on his ph.d. thesis :/

>> Tracepoints all compiled-out :
>>
>> run 1 :                2091.50
>> run 2 (after reboot) : 2089.50 (baseline)
>> run 3 (after reboot) : 2083.61
>>
>> Dormant tracepoints :
>>
>> inline, no immediate value optimization
>>
>> run 1 :                1990.63
>> run 2 (after reboot) : 2025.38 (3 %)
>> run 3 (after reboot) : 2028.81
>>
>> out-of-line, no immediate value optimization
>>
>> run 1 :                1990.66
>> run 2 (after reboot) : 1990.19 (4.7 %)
>> run 3 (after reboot) : 1977.79
>>
>> inline, immediate value optimization
>>
>> run 1 :                2035.99 (2.5 %)
>> run 2 (after reboot) : 2036.11
>> run 3 (after reboot) : 2035.75
>>
>> inline, immediate value optimization, configuring out kmemtrace tracepoints
>>
>> run 1 :                2048.08 (1.9 %)
>> run 2 (after reboot) : 2055.53
>> run 3 (after reboot) : 2046.49
>>   
>
> So what are you doing here?  Are you doing 3 runs, then comparing he  
> median measurement in each case?
>
> The trouble is that your run to run variations are at least as large as  
> the difference you're trying to detect.  For example in run 1 of  
> "inline, no immediate value optimization" you got 1990.6MB/s throughput,  
> and then runs 2 & 3 both went up to ~2025.  Why?  That's a huge jump.
>
> The "out-of-line, no immediate value optimization" runs 1&2 has the same  
> throughput as run 1 of the previous test, 1990MB/s, while run 3 is a bit  
> worse.  OK, so perhaps its slower.  But why are runs 1&2 more or less  
> identical to inline/run1?
>
> What would happen if you happened to do 10 iterations of these tests?   
> There just seems like too much run to run variation to make 3 runs  
> statistically meaningful.
>
> I'm not picking on you personally, because I had exactly the same  
> problems when trying to benchmark the overhead of pvops.  The  
> reboot/rerun variations were at least as large as the effects I'm trying  
> to measure, and I'm just feeling suspicious of all the results.
>
> I think there's something fundimentally off about about this kind of  
> kernel benchmark methodology.  The results are not stable and are not -  
> I think - reliable.  Unfortunately I don't have enough of a background  
> in statistics to really analyze what's going on here, or how we should  
> change the test/measurement methodology to get results that we can  
> really stand by.
>
> I don't even have a good explanation for why there are such large  
> boot-to-boot variations anyway.  The normal explanation is "cache  
> effects", but what is actually changing here?  The kernel image is  
> identical, loaded into the same physical pages each time, and mapped  
> into the same virtual address.  So the I&D caches and tlb should get  
> exactly the same access patterns for the kernel code itself.  The  
> dynamically allocated memory is going to vary, and have different cache  
> interactions, but is that enough to explain these kinds of variations?   
> If so, we're going to need to do a lot more iterations to see any signal  
> from our actual changes over the noise that "cache effects" are throwing  
> our way...
>
>    J

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F  BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68
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