Re: [PATCH 0/2] RFC: readd fair sleepers for server systems

From: Christian Ehrhardt
Date: Tue May 22 2012 - 03:11:49 EST




On 05/21/2012 08:17 PM, Mike Galbraith wrote:
On Mon, 2012-05-21 at 17:45 +0200, Martin Schwidefsky wrote:
our performance team found a performance degradation with a recent
distribution update in regard to fair sleepers (or the lack of fair
sleepers). On s390 we used to run with fair sleepers disabled.

We see the performance degradation with our network benchmark and fair
sleepers enabled, the largest hit is on virtual connections:

I can see you wanting the feature back. You guys apparently do not
generally run mixed loads on your boxen, else you wouldn't want to turn
the scheduler into a tick granularity scheduler, but why compile time?
If the fast path branch isn't important, and given it only became
important while I was trying to scrape a few cycles together, why not
just restore the feature as it used to exist under the pretext that you
need it, and others may as well, so we eat the branch in the interest of
general flexibility, and call removal a booboo?

-Mike


If "eating the branches" is fine for everyone s390 can surely live with it. The intention to make it configurable, was to allow systems that really never want it, to be still able to avoid the branch.

By that everyone can configure it the way they want it and we avoid another modification of the same code over and over again.


--

GrÃsse / regards, Christian Ehrhardt
IBM Linux Technology Center, System z Linux Performance

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