netdev - Re: Performance regression on kernels 3.10 and newer

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Date:	Fri, 15 Aug 2014 10:59:24 -0700
From:	Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com>
To:	Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@...el.com>
Cc:	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>, netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Performance regression on kernels 3.10 and newer

On Fri, 2014-08-15 at 10:15 -0700, Alexander Duyck wrote:

> I realize most of my data is anecdotal as I only have the ixgbe/igb
> adapters and netperf to work with.  This is one of the reasons why I
> keep asking if someone can tell me what the use case is for this where
> it performs well.  From what I can tell it might have had some value
> back in the day before the introduction of things such as RPS/RFS where
> some of the socket processing would be offloaded to other CPUs for a
> single queue device, but even that use case is now deprecated since
> RPS/RFS are there and function better than this.  What I am basically
> looking for is a way to weight the gain versus the penalties to
> determine if this code is even viable anymore.
> 
> In the meantime I think I will put together a patch to default
> tcp_low_latency to 1 for net and stable, and if we cannot find a good
> reason for keeping it then I can submit a patch to net-next that will
> strip it out since I don't see any benefit to having this code.

prequeue is useful on low end hosts, because it allows an application to
delay ACK packets if it is slow. You get a nicer TCP behavior, because
its more tied to scheduling glitches. Especially if TCP windows are not
autotuned. I guess some embedded platforms benefit from this.

I would keep it the way it is, because modern high performance
applications do not trigger prequeue anyway.

It is trivial to add into netperf a poll() before recvmsg() to avoid the
prequeue, or start your benchmarks with appropriate sysctl.

It is certainly not a 'stable' candidate change, it has been there for
years.

Note that we have include/linux/percpu-refcount.h now, we might
autodetect some dst are heavily used by different cpus and switch to a
percpu refcount.

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