Re: Scheduler(?) regression from 2.6.22 to 2.6.24 for short-lived threads

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Mon Feb 11 2008 - 16:45:23 EST


Olof Johansson wrote:

However, I fail to understand the goal of the reproducer. Granted it shows
irregularities in the scheduler under such conditions, but what *real*
workload would spend its time sequentially creating then immediately killing
threads, never using more than 2 at a time ?

If this could be turned into a DoS, I could understand, but here it looks
a bit pointless :-/

It seems generally unfortunate that it takes longer for a new thread to
move over to the second cpu even when the first is busy with the original
thread. I can certainly see cases where this causes suboptimal overall
system behaviour.

I think the moving to another CPU gets really dependent on the CPU type. On a P4+HT the caches are shared, and moving costs almost nothing for cache hits, while on CPUs which have other cache layouts the migration cost is higher. Obviously multi-core should be cheaper than multi-socket, by avoiding using the system memory bus, but it still can get ugly.

I have an IPC test around which showed that, it ran like hell on HT, and progressively worse as cache because less shared. I wonder why the latest git works so much better?

--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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