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Date:	Wed, 7 Apr 2010 14:46:49 +0900
From:	Masayuki Igawa <igawa@....nes.nec.co.jp>
To:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:	Suresh Jayaraman <sjayaraman@...e.de>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Subject: Re: High priority threads causing severe CPU load imbalances

On Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:08:10 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 18:42 +0530, Suresh Jayaraman wrote:
> > I have a simple test program that accepts number of threads(pthreads) to
> > be created as a input. Each of these threads that gets created invokes a
> > function which is just a infinite while loop. The main function after
> > creating those threads goes in a infinite loop itself
> > 
> > My test machine is a Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) 860 with 8
> > sockets(non-HT), I run this test program with number of threads ==
> > number of CPUs:
> > 
> >    ./loadcpu -t 16
> > 
> > I see 100% CPU utilization on almost all CPUs (via mpstat/htop/vmstat).
> > 
> > When the above threads are running, if I introduce a few high priority
> > threads by doing:
> > 
> >    nice -n -13 ./loadcpu -t 3
> > 
> > After a short while, I see a few CPUs becoming idle at ~0% utilization
> > (the number of CPUs becoming idle equals roughly the number of high
> > priority threads i.e. 3). When I stop the high priority threads, the CPU
> > utilization comes back to normal i.e. ~100%.
> > 
> > This is reproducible on 2.6.32.10 stable kernel with all the recent all
> > SMT fixes (I hope) and I think it would be reproducible in current
> > upstream as well.
> 
> Why bother using -stable for reporting bugs?
> 
> > sched_mc_power_savings has been always set to 0.
> > 
> > I spent a while staring at the load balancing and the thread migration
> > code, but could not figure out why this is happening. Would appreciate
> > any pointers.
> 
> Right, except its not a severe imbalance as the subject suggests. For
> some reason it seems to end up in a semi-stable state that is actually
> quite balanced.
> 
> for ((i=0; i<8; i++)) do while :; do :; done & done
> for ((i=0; i<3; i++)) do while :; do :; done & renice -n -15 -p $! ;
> done
> 
> gets me:
> 
> Cpu0  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Cpu1  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Cpu2  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Cpu3  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Cpu4  : 99.0%us,  1.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Cpu5  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Cpu6  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Cpu7  :  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,100.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Mem:  16440840k total,  1073672k used, 15367168k free,   105844k buffers
> Swap: 16777212k total,        0k used, 16777212k free,   296504k cached
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  4370 root       5 -15  105m  804  304 R 100.1  0.0   0:45.02 bash
>  4374 root       5 -15  105m  804  304 R 100.1  0.0   0:44.95 bash
>  4372 root       5 -15  105m  804  304 R 99.1  0.0   0:45.00 bash
>  4364 root      20   0  105m  804  304 R 51.0  0.0   0:33.06 bash
>  4362 root      20   0  105m  800  300 R 50.0  0.0   0:33.17 bash
>  4365 root      20   0  105m  804  304 R 50.0  0.0   0:33.75 bash
>  4368 root      20   0  105m  804  304 R 50.0  0.0   0:33.32 bash
>  4369 root      20   0  105m  804  304 R 50.0  0.0   0:33.38 bash
>  4363 root      20   0  105m  804  304 R 49.1  0.0   0:33.65 bash
>  4366 root      20   0  105m  804  304 R 49.1  0.0   0:33.29 bash
>  4367 root      20   0  105m  804  304 R 49.1  0.0   0:33.54 bash 
> 
> So we have the 3 -15 loops on a cpu each, and the 8 0 loops on 2 cpus
> each, and 1 cpu idle. That is actually quite balanced, 'better' would be
> if those 0 loops would rotate over the 5 available cpus, but that would
> also trash more caches I guess.
> 
> I'm not quite sure what makes the load-balancer end up in this situation
> though, but I suspect the various imbalance_pct things might have
> something to do with it.
> 
> It doesn't always end up in this state either, if you only start 2 -15
> loops its a roll of the dice on what happens, sometimes it ends up with
> the 6 cpus cycling the 2 extra tasks around, sometimes its 1 cpu idle
> with cycling 1 task.
> 
> Unexpected, maybe, severe imbalance, no. Would be nice to get it to be a
> little more stable behaviour though.


I found a similar(maybe same) problem by using the cgroup cpu-subsystem like following:

My test machine has Xeon(Quad Core) with 2 sockets(non-HT).
# mount -t cgroup -o cpu none /dev/cgroup-cpu/
# mkdir -p /dev/cgroup-cpu/204800 /dev/cgroup-cpu/1024
# echo 204800 > /dev/cgroup-cpu/204800/cpu.shares
# for ((i=0; i<3; i++)) do while :; do :; done & echo $! > /dev/cgroup-cpu/204800/tasks ; done
# for ((i=0; i<5; i++)) do while :; do :; done & echo $! > /dev/cgroup-cpu/1024/tasks ; done


gets me:

Tasks: 190 total,   9 running, 181 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu0  :  1.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu1  :  0.0%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Cpu2  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu3  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu4  :  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,100.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu5  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu6  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu7  :100.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   8180292k total,  2430940k used,  5749352k free,   204988k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,  1931820k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  P COMMAND          
30923 root      20   0  5808  540  264 R  100  0.0   2:30.64 3 bash             
30922 root      20   0  5808  540  264 R  100  0.0   2:30.64 2 bash             
30924 root      20   0  5808  540  264 R  100  0.0   2:30.63 6 bash             
30925 root      20   0  5808  540  264 R   42  0.0   1:00.19 7 bash             
30928 root      20   0  5808  540  264 R   41  0.0   0:57.26 5 bash             
30929 root      20   0  5808  540  264 R   40  0.0   0:57.03 7 bash             
30926 root      20   0  5808  540  264 R   39  0.0   0:58.37 7 bash             
30927 root      20   0  5808  540  264 R   39  0.0   0:58.57 5 bash             

I don't expect this behavior.
(I expect that all 8 processes use 100%CPU.)
So I'm investigating this problem.
And I suspect that the cause is find_busiest_group() returns the sched_group 
(as the busiest sched_group) with a high priority process 
although this sched_group has a 100% idle cpu.

IIUC, This problem was caused by changing the load calculation way by this patch,
---
commit 2dd73a4f09beacadde827a032cf15fd8b1fa3d48
Author: Peter Williams <pwil3058@...pond.net.au>
Date:   Tue Jun 27 02:54:34 2006 -0700

    [PATCH] sched: implement smpnice
---
This patch changed the load calculation way from nr_running to weighted_load.
So the scheduler looks on the high priority process as many processes in the load calculation.

I don't find the solution of this problem yet.
I'll dig down more to find the solution.

Thanks.
-- 
Masayuki Igawa

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