Re: [RFC PATCH 5/5] locking/rwsem: Remove reader optimistic spinning

[Davidlohr Bueso]

On Tue, 17 Nov 2020, Waiman Long wrote:

> 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.

I'm not overly worried about the lightly loaded cases here as the users
(mostly thinking mmap_sem) most likely won't care for real workloads,
not, ie: will-it-scale type things.

So at SUSE we also ran into this very same problem with reader optimistic
spinning and considering the fragmentation went with disabling it, much
like this patch - but without the reader optimistic lock stealing bits
you have. So far nothing has really shown to fall out in our performance
automation. And per your data a single reader spinner does not seem to be
worth the added complexity of keeping reader spinning vs ripping it out.

Thanks,
Davidlohr