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

[Vincent Guittot]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 at 21:04, Valentin Schneider
<valentin.schneider@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On 14/09/20 11:03, Vincent Guittot 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.
> >
> > Even on smaller system, a lower busy factor has shown improvement on the
> > fair distribution of the running time so let reduce it for all.
> >
>
> ISTR you mentioned taking this one step further and making
> (interval * busy_factor) scale logarithmically with the number of CPUs to
> avoid reaching outrageous numbers. Did you experiment with that already?

Yes I have tried the logarithmically scale but It didn't give any
benefit compared to this solution for the fairness problem but
impacted other use cases because it impacts idle interval and it also
adds more constraints in the computation of the interval and
busy_factor because we can end up with the same interval for 2
consecutive levels .

That being said, it might be useful for other cases but i haven't look
further for this

>
> > Signed-off-by: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> >  kernel/sched/topology.c | 2 +-
> >  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/kernel/sched/topology.c b/kernel/sched/topology.c
> > index 1a84b778755d..a8477c9e8569 100644
> > --- a/kernel/sched/topology.c
> > +++ b/kernel/sched/topology.c
> > @@ -1336,7 +1336,7 @@ sd_init(struct sched_domain_topology_level *tl,
> >       *sd = (struct sched_domain){
> >               .min_interval           = sd_weight,
> >               .max_interval           = 2*sd_weight,
> > -             .busy_factor            = 32,
> > +             .busy_factor            = 16,
> >               .imbalance_pct          = 117,
> >
> >               .cache_nice_tries       = 0,