Re: Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] cgroup/rstat: Add run_delay accounting for cgroups

[Abel Wu]

On 2/10/25 11:38 PM, Michal Koutný Wrote:
> Hello Abel (sorry for my delay).
>
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 12:48:09PM +0800, Abel Wu <wuyun.abel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > PSI tracks stall times for each cpu, and
> >
> > 	tSOME[cpu] = time(nr_delayed_tasks[cpu] != 0)
> >
> > which turns nr_delayed_tasks[cpu] into boolean value, hence loses
> > insight into how severely this task group is stalled on this cpu.
>
> Thanks for example. So the lost information is kind of a group load.

Exactly.

> What meaning it has when there is no group throttling?

It means how severely this cgroup is interfered by co-located tasks.
Both psi and run_delay are tracked in (part of) our fleet, and the
spikes usually lead to poor SLI. But we do find circumstances that
run_delay has a better correlation with SLI due to the abovementioned
method of stall time accounting.

They are treated as indicators of triggering throttling or evicting
the co-located low priority jobs.

In fact we also track per-cpu stats (cpu.stat.percpu) for cgroups,
including run_delay which helped us to decide which job to be the
victim, and also provided useful info when we diagnose issues.

> Honestly, I can't reason neither about PSI.some nor Σ run_delay wrt
> feedback for resource control. What it is slightly bugging me is
> introduction of another stats field before first one was explored :-)
>
> But if there's information loss with PSI -- could cpu.pressure:some be
> removed in favor of Σ run_delay? (The former could be calculated from
> latter if you're right :-p)

It is not my intent to replacing cpu.pressure:some by run_delay. The
former provides a normalized value that can be used to compare among
different cgroups while the latter isn't able to.

> (I didn't like the before/after shuffling with enum cpu_usage_stat
> NR_STATS but I saw v4 where you tackled that.)
>
> Michal
>
>
> More context form previous message, the difference is between a) and c),
> or better equal lanes:
>
> a')
>     t1 |----|
>     t2 |xx--|
>     t3 |----|
>
> c)
>     t1 |----|
>     t2 |xx--|
>     t3 |xx--|
>
>        <-Δt->

Yes, a) and c) have same cpu.pressure:some but make different progress.

> run_delay can be calculated indepently of cpu.pressure:some
> because there is still difference between a') and c) in terms of total
> cpu usage.
>
> 	Δrun_delay = nr * Δt - Δusage
>
> The challenge is with nr (assuming they're all runnable during Δt), that
> would need to be sampled from /sys/kernel/debug/sched/debug. But then
> you can get whatever load for individual cfs_rqs from there. Hm, does it
> even make sense to add up run_delays from different CPUs?

Very good question. In our case, this summed value is used as a general
indicator to trigger strategy which further depends on raw per-cpu data
provided by cpu.stat.percpu, which implies that what we actually want is
the per-cpu data.

Thanks & Best Regards,
	Abel