Re: [RRC PATCH 2/2] vfs: Use per-cpu list for superblock's inode list

From: Waiman Long
Date: Wed Feb 17 2016 - 10:40:42 EST


On 02/17/2016 02:16 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Waiman Long<Waiman.Long@xxxxxxx> wrote:

When many threads are trying to add or delete inode to or from
a superblock's s_inodes list, spinlock contention on the list can
become a performance bottleneck.

This patch changes the s_inodes field to become a per-cpu list with
per-cpu spinlocks.

With an exit microbenchmark that creates a large number of threads,
attachs many inodes to them and then exits. The runtimes of that
microbenchmark with 1000 threads before and after the patch on a
4-socket Intel E7-4820 v3 system (40 cores, 80 threads) were as
follows:

Kernel Elapsed Time System Time
------ ------------ -----------
Vanilla 4.5-rc4 65.29s 82m14s
Patched 4.5-rc4 22.81s 23m03s

Before the patch, spinlock contention at the inode_sb_list_add()
function at the startup phase and the inode_sb_list_del() function at
the exit phase were about 79% and 93% of total CPU time respectively
(as measured by perf). After the patch, the percpu_list_add()
function consumed only about 0.04% of CPU time at startup phase. The
percpu_list_del() function consumed about 0.4% of CPU time at exit
phase. There were still some spinlock contention, but they happened
elsewhere.
Pretty impressive IMHO!

Just for the record, here's your former 'batched list' number inserted into the
above table:

Kernel Elapsed Time System Time
------ ------------ -----------
Vanilla [v4.5-rc4] 65.29s 82m14s
batched list [v4.4] 45.69s 49m44s
percpu list [v4.5-rc4] 22.81s 23m03s

i.e. the proper per CPU data structure and the resulting improvement in cache
locality gave another doubling in performance.

Just out of curiosity, could you post the profile of the latest patches - is there
any (bigger) SMP overhead left, or is the profile pretty flat now?

Thanks,

Ingo

Yes, there were still spinlock contention elsewhere in the exit path. Now the bulk of the CPU times was in:

- 79.23% 79.23% a.out [kernel.kallsyms] [k] native_queued_spin
- native_queued_spin_lock_slowpath
- 99.99% queued_spin_lock_slowpath
- 100.00% _raw_spin_lock
- 99.98% list_lru_del
- d_lru_del
- 100.00% select_collect
detach_and_collect
d_walk
d_invalidate
proc_flush_task
release_task
do_exit
do_group_exit
get_signal
do_signal
exit_to_usermode_loop
syscall_return_slowpath
int_ret_from_sys_call

The locks that were being contended were nlru->lock. For a 4-node system that I used, there will be four of those.

Cheers,
Longman