Re: [PATCH 0/10] psi: pressure stall information for CPU, memory, and IO v2

[Johannes Weiner]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:07:32AM +1000, Singh, Balbir wrote:
> On 7/25/18 1:15 AM, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 07:14:02AM +1000, Balbir Singh wrote:
> >> Does the mechanism scale? I am a little concerned about how frequently
> >> this infrastructure is monitored/read/acted upon.
> > 
> > I expect most users to poll in the frequency ballpark of the running
> > averages (10s, 1m, 5m). Our OOMD defaults to 5s polling of the 10s
> > average; we collect the 1m average once per minute from our machines
> > and cgroups to log the system/workload health trends in our fleet.
> > 
> > Suren has been experimenting with adaptive polling down to the
> > millisecond range on Android.
> > 
> 
> I think this is a bad way of doing things, polling only adds to
> overheads, there needs to be an event driven mechanism and the
> selection of the events need to happen in user space.

Of course, I'm not saying you should be doing this, and in fact Suren
and I were talking about notification/event infrastructure.

You asked if this scales and I'm telling you it's not impossible to
read at such frequencies.

Maybe you can clarify your question.

> >> Why aren't existing mechanisms sufficient
> > 
> > Our existing stuff gives a lot of indication when something *may* be
> > an issue, like the rate of page reclaim, the number of refaults, the
> > average number of active processes, one task waiting on a resource.
> > 
> > But the real difference between an issue and a non-issue is how much
> > it affects your overall goal of making forward progress or reacting to
> > a request in time. And that's the only thing users really care
> > about. It doesn't matter whether my system is doing 2314 or 6723 page
> > refaults per minute, or scanned 8495 pages recently. I need to know
> > whether I'm losing 1% or 20% of my time on overcommitted memory.
> > 
> > Delayacct is time-based, so it's a step in the right direction, but it
> > doesn't aggregate tasks and CPUs into compound productivity states to
> > tell you if only parts of your workload are seeing delays (which is
> > often tolerable for the purpose of ensuring maximum HW utilization) or
> > your system overall is not making forward progress. That aggregation
> > isn't something you can do in userspace with polled delayacct data.
> 
> By aggregation you mean cgroup aggregation?

System-wide and per cgroup.