Message-ID: <20070421130216.GC6383@1wt.eu>
Date:	Sat, 21 Apr 2007 15:02:16 +0200
From:	Willy Tarreau <w@....eu>
To:	Con Kolivas <kernel@...ivas.org>
Cc:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, 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>,
	Peter Williams <pwil3058@...pond.net.au>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>, caglar@...dus.org.tr,
	Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [REPORT] cfs-v4 vs sd-0.44

On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 10:40:18PM +1000, Con Kolivas wrote:
> On Saturday 21 April 2007 22:12, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > Hi Ingo, Hi Con,
> >
> > I promised to perform some tests on your code. I'm short in time right now,
> > but I observed behaviours that should be commented on.
> >
> > 1) machine : dual athlon 1533 MHz, 1G RAM, kernel 2.6.21-rc7 + either
> > scheduler Test:  ./ocbench -R 250000 -S 750000 -x 8 -y 8
> >    ocbench: http://linux.1wt.eu/sched/
> >
> > 2) SD-0.44
> >
> >    Feels good, but becomes jerky at moderately high loads. I've started
> >    64 ocbench with a 250 ms busy loop and 750 ms sleep time. The system
> >    always responds correctly but under X, mouse jumps quite a bit and
> >    typing in xterm or even text console feels slightly jerky. The CPU is
> >    not completely used, and the load varies a lot (see below). However,
> >    the load is shared equally between all 64 ocbench, and they do not
> >    deviate even after 4000 iterations. X uses less than 1% CPU during
> >    those tests.
> >
> >    Here's the vmstat output :
> [snip]
> 
> > 3) CFS-v4
> >
> >   Feels even better, mouse movements are very smooth even under high load.
> >   I noticed that X gets reniced to -19 with this scheduler. I've not looked
> >   at the code yet but this looked suspicious to me. I've reniced it to 0
> > and it did not change any behaviour. Still very good. The 64 ocbench share
> > equal CPU time and show exact same progress after 2000 iterations. The CPU
> > load is more smoothly spread according to vmstat, and there's no idle (see
> > below). BUT I now think it was wrong to let new processes start with no
> > timeslice at all, because it can take tens of seconds to start a new
> > process when only 64 ocbench are there. Simply starting "killall ocbench"
> > takes about 10 seconds. On a smaller machine (VIA C3-533), it took me more
> > than one minute to do "su -", even from console, so that's not X. BTW, X
> > uses less than 1% CPU during those tests.
> >
> > willy@pcw:~$ vmstat 1
> [snip]
> 
> > 4) first impressions
> >
> > I think that CFS is based on a more promising concept but is less mature
> > and is dangerous right now with certain workloads. SD shows some strange
> > behaviours like not using all CPU available and a little jerkyness, but is
> > more robust and may be the less risky solution for a first step towards
> > a better scheduler in mainline, but it may also probably be the last O(1)
> > scheduler, which may be replaced sometime later when CFS (or any other one)
> > shows at the same time the smoothness of CFS and the robustness of SD.
> 
> I assumed from your description that you were running X nice 0 during all this 
Yes, that's what I did.

> testing and left the tunables from both SD and CFS at their defaults;

yes too because I don't have enough time to try many combinations this week-end.

> this 
> tends to have the effective equivalent of "timeslice" in CFS smaller than SD.

If you look at the CS column in vmstat, you'll see that there's about twice
as many context switches with CFS than with SD, meaning the average timeslice
would be about twice as short with CFS. But my impression is that some tasks
occasionally get very long timeslices with SD while this never happens with
CFS, hence the very smooth versus jerky feeling which cannot be explained
by just halved timeslices alone.

> > I'm sorry not to spend more time on them right now, I hope that other
> > people will do.
> 
> Thanks for that interesting testing you've done. The fluctuating cpu load and 
> the apparently high idle time means there is almost certainly a bug still in 
> the cpu accounting I do in update_cpu_clock. It looks suspicious to me 
> already on just my first glance. Fortunately the throughput does not appear 
> to be adversely affected on other benchmarks so I suspect it's lying about 
> the idle time and it's not really there. Which means it's likely also 
> accounting the cpu time wrongly.

It is possible that only measurement is wrong because the time was evenly
distributed among the 64 processes. Maybe the fix could also prevent some
tasks from occasionally stealing one slice and reduce the jerkiness feeling.
Anyway, it's just a bit jerky, no more freezes as we've known for years ;-)

> Which also means there's something I can fix and improve SD further.
> Great stuff, thanks! 

You're welcome !

Cheers,
Willy

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