On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 09:20:44AM -0400, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
On 2023-03-27 04:05, Aaron Lu wrote:
Hi Mathieu,
I was doing some optimization work[1] for kernel scheduler using a
database workload: sysbench+postgres and before I submit my work, I
rebased my patch on top of latest v6.3-rc kernels to see if everything
still works expected and then I found rq's lock became very heavily
contended as compared to v6.2 based kernels.
Using the above mentioned workload, before commit af7f588d8f73("sched:
Introduce per-memory-map concurrency ID"), the profile looked like:
7.30% 0.71% [kernel.vmlinux] [k] __schedule
0.03% 0.03% [kernel.vmlinux] [k] native_queued_spin_lock_slowpath
After that commit:
49.01% 0.87% [kernel.vmlinux] [k] __schedule
43.20% 43.18% [kernel.vmlinux] [k] native_queued_spin_lock_slowpath
The above profile was captured with sysbench's nr_threads set to 56; if
I used more thread number, the contention would be more severe on that
2sockets/112core/224cpu Intel Sapphire Rapids server.
The docker image I used to do optimization work is not available outside
but I managed to reproduce this problem using only publicaly available
stuffs, here it goes:
1 docker pull postgres
2 sudo docker run --rm --name postgres-instance -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mypass -e POSTGRES_USER=sbtest -d postgres -c shared_buffers=80MB -c max_connections=250
3 go inside the container
sudo docker exec -it $the_just_started_container_id bash
4 install sysbench inside container
sudo apt update and sudo apt install sysbench
5 prepare
root@container:/# sysbench --db-driver=pgsql --pgsql-user=sbtest --pgsql_password=mypass --pgsql-db=sbtest --pgsql-port=5432 --tables=16 --table-size=10000 --threads=56 --time=60 --report-interval=2 /usr/share/sysbench/oltp_read_only.lua prepare
6 run
root@container:/# sysbench --db-driver=pgsql --pgsql-user=sbtest --pgsql_password=mypass --pgsql-db=sbtest --pgsql-port=5432 --tables=16 --table-size=10000 --threads=56 --time=60 --report-interval=2 /usr/share/sysbench/oltp_read_only.lua run
Let it warm up a little bit and after 10-20s you can do profile and see
the increased rq lock contention. You may need a machine that has at
least 56 cpus to see this, I didn't try on other machines.
Feel free to let me know if you need any other info.
While I setup my dev machine with this reproducer, here are a few
questions to help figure out the context:
I understand that pgsql is a multi-process database. Is it strictly
single-threaded per-process, or does each process have more than
one thread ?
I do not know the details of Postgres, according to this:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/FAQ#How_does_PostgreSQL_use_CPU_resources.3F
I think it is single-threaded per-process.
The client, sysbench, is single process multi-threaded IIUC.
I understand that your workload is scheduling between threads which
belong to different processes. Are there more heavily active threads
than there are scheduler runqueues (CPUs) on your machine ?
In the reproducer I described above, 56 threads are started on the
client side and if each client thread is served by a server process,
there would be about 112 tasks. I don't think the client thread and
the server process are active at the same time but even if they are,
112 is still smaller than the machine's CPU number: 224.
When I developed the mm_cid feature, I originally implemented two additional
optimizations:
Additional optimizations can be done if the spin locks added when
context switching between threads belonging to different memory maps end
up being a performance bottleneck. Those are left out of this patch
though. A performance impact would have to be clearly demonstrated to
justify the added complexity.
I suspect that your workload demonstrates the need for at least one of those
optimizations. I just wonder if we are in a purely single-threaded scenario
for each process, or if each process has many threads.
My understanding is: the server side is single threaded and the client
side is multi threaded.
Thanks,
Aaron