Date:   Mon, 7 Dec 2020 19:56:43 -0800
From:   Davidlohr Bueso <dave@...olabs.net>
To:     Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>
Cc:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>, Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Phil Auld <pauld@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 5/5] locking/rwsem: Remove reader optimistic spinning

On Fri, 20 Nov 2020, Waiman Long wrote:

>Reader optimistic spinning is helpful when the reader critical section
>is short and there aren't that many readers around. It also improves
>the chance that a reader can get the lock as writer optimistic spinning
>disproportionally favors writers much more than readers.
>
>Since commit d3681e269fff ("locking/rwsem: Wake up almost all readers
>in wait queue"), all the waiting readers are woken up so that they can
>all get the read lock and run in parallel. When the number of contending
>readers is large, allowing reader optimistic spinning will likely cause
>reader fragmentation where multiple smaller groups of readers can get
>the read lock in a sequential manner separated by writers. That reduces
>reader parallelism.
>
>One possible way to address that drawback is to limit the number of
>readers (preferably one) that can do optimistic spinning. These readers
>act as representatives of all the waiting readers in the wait queue as
>they will wake up all those waiting readers once they get the lock.
>
>Alternatively, as reader optimistic lock stealing has already enhanced
>fairness to readers, it may be easier to just remove reader optimistic
>spinning and simplifying the optimistic spinning code as a result.
>
>Performance measurements (locking throughput kops/s) using a locking
>microbenchmark with 50/50 reader/writer distribution and turbo-boost
>disabled was done on a 2-socket Cascade Lake system (48-core 96-thread)
>to see the impacts of these changes:
>
>  1) Vanilla     - 5.10-rc3 kernel
>  2) Before      - 5.10-rc3 kernel with previous patches in this series
>  2) limit-rspin - 5.10-rc3 kernel with limited reader spinning patch
>  3) no-rspin    - 5.10-rc3 kernel with reader spinning disabled
>
>  # of threads  CS Load   Vanilla  Before   limit-rspin   no-rspin
>  ------------  -------   -------  ------   -----------   --------
>       2            1      5,185    5,662      5,214       5,077
>       4            1      5,107    4,983      5,188       4,760
>       8            1      4,782    4,564      4,720       4,628
>      16            1      4,680    4,053      4,567       3,402
>      32            1      4,299    1,115      1,118       1,098
>      64            1      3,218      983      1,001         957
>      96            1      1,938      944        957         930
>
>       2           20      2,008    2,128      2,264       1,665
>       4           20      1,390    1,033      1,046       1,101
>       8           20      1,472    1,155      1,098       1,213
>      16           20      1,332    1,077      1,089       1,122
>      32           20        967      914        917         980
>      64           20        787      874        891         858
>      96           20        730      836        847         844
>
>       2          100        372      356        360         355
>       4          100        492      425        434         392
>       8          100        533      537        529         538
>      16          100        548      572        568         598
>      32          100        499      520        527         537
>      64          100        466      517        526         512
>      96          100        406      497        506         509
>
>The column "CS Load" represents the number of pause instructions issued
>in the locking critical section. A CS load of 1 is extremely short and
>is not likey in real situations. A load of 20 (moderate) and 100 (long)
>are more realistic.
>
>It can be seen that the previous patches in this series have reduced
>performance in general except in highly contended cases with moderate
>or long critical sections that performance improves a bit. This change
>is mostly caused by the "Prevent potential lock starvation" patch that
>reduce reader optimistic spinning and hence reduce reader fragmentation.
>
>The patch that further limit reader optimistic spinning doesn't seem to
>have too much impact on overall performance as shown in the benchmark
>data.
>
>The patch that disables reader optimistic spinning shows reduced
>performance at lightly loaded cases, but comparable or slightly better
>performance on with heavier contention.
>
>This patch just removes reader optimistic spinning for now. As readers
>are not going to do optimistic spinning anymore, we don't need to
>consider if the OSQ is empty or not when doing lock stealing.
>
>Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>

Reviewed-by: Davidlohr Bueso <dbueso@...e.de>

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