Re: [BUG nohz]: wrong user and system time accounting

From: Mike Galbraith
Date: Thu Mar 30 2017 - 09:35:35 EST


On Thu, 2017-03-30 at 09:02 -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Thu, 2017-03-30 at 14:51 +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:

> > Also, why does it raise power consumption issues?
>
> On a system without either nohz_full or nohz idle
> mode, skewed ticks result in CPU cores waking up
> at different times, and keeping an idle system
> consuming power for more time than it would if all
> the ticks happened simultaneously.

And if your server farm is mostly idle, that power savings may delay
your bankruptcy proceedings by a whole microsecond ;-)

Or more seriously, what skew does do on boxen of size X today is
something for perf to say. At the time, removal was very bad for my 8
socket box, and allegedly caused huge SGI beasts in horrific pain.

-Mike