Re: [PATCH 0/4] locks: avoid thundering-herd wake-ups

[J. Bruce Fields]

On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 11:51:07AM +1000, NeilBrown wrote:
> If you have a many-core machine, and have many threads all wanting to
> briefly lock a give file (udev is known to do this), you can get quite
> poor performance.
> 
> When one thread releases a lock, it wakes up all other threads that
> are waiting (classic thundering-herd) - one will get the lock and the
> others go to sleep.
> When you have few cores, this is not very noticeable: by the time the
> 4th or 5th thread gets enough CPU time to try to claim the lock, the
> earlier threads have claimed it, done what was needed, and released.
> With 50+ cores, the contention can easily be measured.
> 
> This patchset creates a tree of pending lock request in which siblings
> don't conflict and each lock request does conflict with its parent.
> When a lock is released, only requests which don't conflict with each
> other a woken.

Are you sure you aren't depending on the (incorrect) assumption that "X
blocks Y" is a transitive relation?

OK I should be able to answer that question myself, my patience for
code-reading is at a real low this afternoon....

--b.

> 
> Testing shows that lock-acquisitions-per-second is now fairly stable even
> as number of contending process goes to 1000.  Without this patch,
> locks-per-second drops off steeply after a few 10s of processes.
> 
> There is a small cost to this extra complexity.
> At 20 processes running a particular test on 72 cores, the lock
> acquisitions per second drops from 1.8 million to 1.4 million with
> this patch.  For 100 processes, this patch still provides 1.4 million
> while without this patch there are about 700,000.
> 
> NeilBrown
> 
> ---
> 
> NeilBrown (4):
>       fs/locks: rename some lists and pointers.
>       fs/locks: allow a lock request to block other requests.
>       fs/locks: change all *_conflict() functions to return bool.
>       fs/locks: create a tree of dependent requests.
> 
> 
>  fs/cifs/file.c                  |    2 -
>  fs/locks.c                      |  142 +++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------
>  include/linux/fs.h              |    5 +
>  include/trace/events/filelock.h |   16 ++--
>  4 files changed, 103 insertions(+), 62 deletions(-)
> 
> --
> Signature