Re: [Patch][RFC] Disabling per-tgid stats on task exit in taskstats

[Shailabh Nagar]

Hi Andrew,

Two developments on the tgid overhead issue:

1. The latest results show that overhead is significant
only when the exit rate exceeds roughly 1000 threads/second.

2. A new patch that modifies the locking used within taskstats,
brings down the overhead of the extreme case quite a bit.
I'll submit the patch along shortly in a separate mail.

To get back to the effect of exit rate, I modified the fork+exit
benchmark to vary the rate at which exits happened and
ran tests on a 4-way 1.4 GHz x86_64 box. The kernel was 2.6.17,
uses the delay accounting/taskstat patches in 2.6.17-mm1 + the new
locking patch mentioned in 2. above.

The results show that differential between tgid on and off
starts becoming significant once the exit rate crosses roughly 1000
threads/second. Below that exit rate, the difference is negligible.
Above it, the difference starts climbing rapidly.

So I guess the question is whether this rate of exit is representative
enough of real life to warrant making any more changes to the existing
patchset, beyond the locking changes in 2. above.

>From my limited experience, I think this is too high an exit rate
to be worrying about overhead.


        %ovhd of tgid on over off
        (higher is worse)

Exit     User     Sys     Elapsed
Rate     Time     Time    Time

2283      25.76  649.41   -0.14
1193     -10.53   88.81   -0.12
963      -11.90    3.28   -0.10
806       -8.54   -0.84    0.16
694       -4.41    2.38    0.03

Exit Rate: units are threads exiting per second.
Calculated by (#threads_forked+exited)/(elapsed_time)/2
Since app pretty much does only thread create and exit for 10000
threads (1000 threads, 10 iterations), this is a good measure
for exit rate.

%diff in user, sys, elapsed times calculated using
(tgid_on - tgid_off)/tgid_off * 100
where tgid_on/off times are reported by /usr/bin/time as before.

Each data point for tgid_on and tgid_off was an average
of 10 runs of the fork+exit benchmark.
The rate of exits was controlled by delaying the individual
threads through a usleep before being allowed to exit.

Machine was 4-way 1.6GHz x86_64 Opteron.

"exit_recv -w", the user program consuming the stats, was running
on the side, reading the stats but not writing to a file or
printing to screen.
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