Re: Slow pty's (was Re: libdivecomputer interfaces?)

From: Brian Bloniarz
Date: Thu Jun 10 2010 - 18:25:49 EST


On 06/10/2010 02:10 PM, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
> (sorry if this reponse isn't on target, i was just pointed to this
> thread a few minutes ago)
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 10:25:36AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>> I thought we long since (ie back last fall) fixed the latency
>> problems with pty's, but there does seem to be something very fishy
>> going on there still.
>
> this might not be related, but i have slow serial ports with NOHZ that
> goes away when i revert 39c0cbe2150cbd848a25ba6cdb271d1ad46818ad.

Unrelated or not, I think Chris is right about this. Somewhere before
-rc1, the emulated serial console on my KVM instance became slow
to echo input. I just tested with the commit reverted and it's
back to normal.

> commit 39c0cbe2150cbd848a25ba6cdb271d1ad46818ad
> Author: Mike Galbraith <efault@xxxxxx>
> Date: Thu Mar 11 17:17:13 2010 +0100
>
> sched: Rate-limit nohz
>
> Entering nohz code on every micro-idle is costing ~10% throughput for netperf
> TCP_RR when scheduling cross-cpu. Rate limiting entry fixes this, but raises
> ticks a bit. On my Q6600, an idle box goes from ~85 interrupts/sec to 128.
>
> The higher the context switch rate, the more nohz entry costs. With this patch
> and some cycle recovery patches in my tree, max cross cpu context switch rate is
> improved by ~16%, a large portion of which of which is this ratelimiting.
>
> and looking at the only two interesting hunks it's not clear why:
>
> +int nohz_ratelimit(int cpu)
> +{
> + struct rq *rq = cpu_rq(cpu);
> + u64 diff = rq->clock - rq->nohz_stamp;
> +
> + rq->nohz_stamp = rq->clock;
> +
> + return diff < (NSEC_PER_SEC / HZ) >> 1;
> +}
>
> + if (nohz_ratelimit(cpu))
> + goto end;
> +
>
> network latnecy is fine, and if i create lots of wakeups (network IO
> is fine) then the serial port latency is noticable
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