Re: [PATCH 4/4] sched/fair: reduce busy load balance interval

[Jiang Biao]

Hi, Vincent

On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 at 17:28, Vincent Guittot
<vincent.guittot@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 at 11:11, Jiang Biao <benbjiang@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Hi, Vincent
> >
> > On Mon, 14 Sep 2020 at 18:07, Vincent Guittot
> > <vincent.guittot@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > The busy_factor, which increases load balance interval when a cpu is busy,
> > > is set to 32 by default. This value generates some huge LB interval on
> > > large system like the THX2 made of 2 node x 28 cores x 4 threads.
> > > For such system, the interval increases from 112ms to 3584ms at MC level.
> > > And from 228ms to 7168ms at NUMA level.
> > Agreed that the interval is too big for that case.
> > But would it be too small for an AMD environment(like ROME) with 8cpu
> > at MC level(CCX), if we reduce busy_factor?
>
> Are you sure that this is too small ? As mentioned in the commit
> message below, I tested it on small system (2x4 cores Arm64) and i
> have seen some improvements
Not so sure. :)
Small interval means more frequent balances and more cost consumed for
balancing, especially for pinned vm cases.
For our case, we have AMD ROME servers made of 2node x 48cores x
2thread, and 8c at MC level(within a CCX). The 256ms interval seems a
little too big for us, compared to Intel Cascadlake CPU with 48c at MC
level, whose balance interval is 1536ms. 128ms seems a little more
waste. :)
I guess more balance costs may hurt the throughput of sysbench like
benchmark.. Just a guess.

>
> > For that case, the interval could be reduced from 256ms to 128ms.
> > Or should we define an MIN_INTERVAL for MC level to avoid too small interval?
>
> What would be a too small interval ?
That's hard to say. :)
My guess is just for large server system cases.

Thanks.
Regards,
Jiang