Re: IRQ balancing on a router

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Fri Oct 03 2008 - 11:22:50 EST


Jan Kasprzak wrote:
Arjan van de Ven wrote:
: Jan Kasprzak <kas@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
: > The result is
: > that the CPU which receives IRQs for the uplink interface
: > is 100 % busy (softirq mostly), while the other one is 90% idle.
: : one of the hard cases for irqbalance is that irqbalance doesn't have a
: way to find out the actual cpu time spend in the handlers. For
: networking it makes an estimate just based on the number of packets
: (which is better than nothing)... but that breaks down if you have an
: non-symmetry in CPU costs per packet like you have.
: : The good news is that irqthreads at least have the potential to solve
: this "lack of information"; if not, we could consider doing a form of
: microaccounting for irq handlers....

I am not sure whether this would help. In my case, the most of the
in-kernel CPU time is not spend in the irq handler per se, but in softirq
(i.e. checking the packet against iptables rules).

there is some consideration of making softirqs that are raised run as part of the irq thread.
or at least thoughts in that direction.
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