linux-kernel - Optimize perf stat for large number of events/cpus v3

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Date:   Fri, 25 Oct 2019 11:14:10 -0700
From:   Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>
To:     acme@...nel.org
Cc:     jolsa@...nel.org, eranian@...gle.com, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Optimize perf stat for large number of events/cpus v3

[v3: Address review feedback. Fix minor bug and rebase 
to latest tip/perf/core avoiding one reject.]

This patch kit optimizes perf stat for a large number of events 
on systems with many CPUs and PMUs.

Some profiling shows that the most overhead is doing IPIs to
all the target CPUs. We can optimize this by using sched_setaffinity
to set the affinity to a target CPU once and then doing
the perf operation for all events on that CPU. This requires
some restructuring, but cuts the set up time quite a bit.

In theory we could go further by parallelizing these setups
too, but that would be much more complicated and for now just batching it
per CPU seems to be sufficient. At some point with many more cores 
parallelization or a better bulk perf setup API might be needed though.

In addition perf does a lot of redundant /sys accesses with
many PMUs, which can be also expensve. This is also optimized.

On a large test case (>700 events with many weak groups) on a 94 CPU
system I go from

real	0m8.607s
user	0m0.550s
sys	0m8.041s

to 

real	0m3.269s
user	0m0.760s
sys	0m1.694s

so shaving ~6 seconds of system time, at slightly more cost
in perf stat itself. On a 4 socket system with the savings
are more dramatic:

real	0m15.641s
user	0m0.873s
sys	0m14.729s

to 

real	0m4.493s
user	0m1.578s
sys	0m2.444s

so 11s difference in the user visible set up time.

Also available in 

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ak/linux-misc perf/stat-scale-5

v1: Initial post.
v2: Rebase. Fix some minor issues.
v3: Rebase. Address review feedback. Fix one minor issue

-Andi