Re: -mm seems significanty slower than mainline on kernbench

From: Peter Williams
Date: Tue Jan 10 2006 - 21:44:33 EST


Con Kolivas wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 12:41 pm, Martin Bligh wrote:

Seems to have gone wrong between 2.6.14-rc1-mm1 and 2.6.14-rc2-mm1 ?
See http://test.kernel.org/perf/kernbench.moe.png for clearest effect.


The only new scheduler patch at that time was this:
+sched-modified-nice-support-for-smp-load-balancing.patch

which was Peter's modifications to my smp nice support. cc'ed Peter


This patch will probably have overhead implications as it will skip some tasks during load balancing looking for ones whose bias_prio is small enough to fit within the amount of bias to be moved. Because the candidate tasks are ordered in the array by dynamic priority and not nice (or bias_prio) the search is exhaustive. I need to think about whether this can be made a little smarter e.g. skip to the next idx as soon as a task whose bias_prio is too large is encountered. This would have the effect of missing some tasks that could have been moved due but these will generally be tasks with interactive bonuses causing them to be in a lower slot in the queue than would otherwise be the case and as they generally do small CPU runs not moving them probably won't make much difference.

> I guess we need to check whether reversing this patch helps.

It would be interesting to see if it does.

If it does we probably have to wear the cost (and try to reduce it) as without this change smp nice support is fairly ineffective due to the fact that it moves exactly the same tasks as would be moved without it. At the most it changes the frequency at which load balancing occurs.

Peter
--
Peter Williams pwil3058@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."
-- Ambrose Bierce
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