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Message-ID: <20061130064758.GD2003@elte.hu>
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 07:47:58 +0100
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
To: David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
Cc: wenji@...l.gov, akpm@...l.org, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [patch 1/4] - Potential performance bottleneck for Linxu TCP
* David Miller <davem@...emloft.net> wrote:
> > yeah, i like this one. If the problem is "too long locked section",
> > then the most natural solution is to "break up the lock", not to
> > "boost the priority of the lock-holding task" (which is what the
> > proposed patch does).
>
> Ingo you're mis-read the problem :-)
yeah, the problem isnt too long locked section but "too much time spent
holding a lock" and hence opening up ourselves to possible negative
side-effects of the scheduler's fairness algorithm when it forces a
preemption of that process context with that lock held (and forcing all
subsequent packets to be backlogged).
but please read my last mail - i think i'm slowly starting to wake up
;-) I dont think there is any real problem: a tweak to the scheduler
that in essence gives TCP-using tasks a preference changes the balance
of workloads. Such an explicit tweak is possible already.
furthermore, the tweak allows the shifting of processing from a
prioritized process context into a highest-priority softirq context.
(it's not proven that there is any significant /net win/ of performance:
all that was proven is that if we shift TCP processing from process
context into softirq context then TCP throughput of that otherwise
penalized process context increases.)
Ingo
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