schedstats is very useful during debugging and performance tuning but it
incurs overhead to calculate the stats. As such, even though it can be
disabled at build time, it is often enabled as the information is useful.
This patch adds a kernel command-line and sysctl tunable to enable or
disable schedstats on demand (when it's built in). It is disabled
by default as someone who knows they need it can also learn to enable
it when necessary.
The benefits are dependent on how scheduler-intensive the workload is.
If it is then the patch reduces the number of cycles spent calculating
the stats with a small benefit from reducing the cache footprint of the
scheduler.
These measurements were taken from a 48-core 2-socket
machine with Xeon(R) E5-2670 v3 cpus although they were also tested on a
single socket machine 8-core machine with Intel i7-3770 processors.
netperf-tcp
4.5.0-rc1 4.5.0-rc1
vanilla nostats-v3r1
Hmean 64 560.45 ( 0.00%) 575.98 ( 2.77%)
Hmean 128 766.66 ( 0.00%) 795.79 ( 3.80%)
Hmean 256 950.51 ( 0.00%) 981.50 ( 3.26%)
Hmean 1024 1433.25 ( 0.00%) 1466.51 ( 2.32%)
Hmean 2048 2810.54 ( 0.00%) 2879.75 ( 2.46%)
Hmean 3312 4618.18 ( 0.00%) 4682.09 ( 1.38%)
Hmean 4096 5306.42 ( 0.00%) 5346.39 ( 0.75%)
Hmean 8192 10581.44 ( 0.00%) 10698.15 ( 1.10%)
Hmean 16384 18857.70 ( 0.00%) 18937.61 ( 0.42%)
Small gains here, UDP_STREAM showed nothing intresting and neither did
the TCP_RR tests. The gains on the 8-core machine were very similar.
tbench4
4.5.0-rc1 4.5.0-rc1
vanilla nostats-v3r1
Hmean mb/sec-1 500.85 ( 0.00%) 522.43 ( 4.31%)
Hmean mb/sec-2 984.66 ( 0.00%) 1018.19 ( 3.41%)
Hmean mb/sec-4 1827.91 ( 0.00%) 1847.78 ( 1.09%)
Hmean mb/sec-8 3561.36 ( 0.00%) 3611.28 ( 1.40%)
Hmean mb/sec-16 5824.52 ( 0.00%) 5929.03 ( 1.79%)
Hmean mb/sec-32 10943.10 ( 0.00%) 10802.83 ( -1.28%)
Hmean mb/sec-64 15950.81 ( 0.00%) 16211.31 ( 1.63%)
Hmean mb/sec-128 15302.17 ( 0.00%) 15445.11 ( 0.93%)
Hmean mb/sec-256 14866.18 ( 0.00%) 15088.73 ( 1.50%)
Hmean mb/sec-512 15223.31 ( 0.00%) 15373.69 ( 0.99%)
Hmean mb/sec-1024 14574.25 ( 0.00%) 14598.02 ( 0.16%)
Hmean mb/sec-2048 13569.02 ( 0.00%) 13733.86 ( 1.21%)
Hmean mb/sec-3072 12865.98 ( 0.00%) 13209.23 ( 2.67%)
Small gains of 2-4% at low thread counts and otherwise flat. The
gains on the 8-core machine were slightly different
tbench4 on 8-core i7-3770 single socket machine
Hmean mb/sec-1 442.59 ( 0.00%) 448.73 ( 1.39%)
Hmean mb/sec-2 796.68 ( 0.00%) 794.39 ( -0.29%)
Hmean mb/sec-4 1322.52 ( 0.00%) 1343.66 ( 1.60%)
Hmean mb/sec-8 2611.65 ( 0.00%) 2694.86 ( 3.19%)
Hmean mb/sec-16 2537.07 ( 0.00%) 2609.34 ( 2.85%)
Hmean mb/sec-32 2506.02 ( 0.00%) 2578.18 ( 2.88%)
Hmean mb/sec-64 2511.06 ( 0.00%) 2569.16 ( 2.31%)
Hmean mb/sec-128 2313.38 ( 0.00%) 2395.50 ( 3.55%)
Hmean mb/sec-256 2110.04 ( 0.00%) 2177.45 ( 3.19%)
Hmean mb/sec-512 2072.51 ( 0.00%) 2053.97 ( -0.89%)
In constract, this shows a relatively steady 2-3% gain at higher thread
counts. Due to the nature of the patch and the type of workload, it's
not a surprise that the result will depend on the CPU used.
hackbench-pipes
4.5.0-rc1 4.5.0-rc1
vanilla nostats-v3r1
Amean 1 0.0637 ( 0.00%) 0.0660 ( -3.59%)
Amean 4 0.1229 ( 0.00%) 0.1181 ( 3.84%)
Amean 7 0.1921 ( 0.00%) 0.1911 ( 0.52%)
Amean 12 0.3117 ( 0.00%) 0.2923 ( 6.23%)
Amean 21 0.4050 ( 0.00%) 0.3899 ( 3.74%)
Amean 30 0.4586 ( 0.00%) 0.4433 ( 3.33%)
Amean 48 0.5910 ( 0.00%) 0.5694 ( 3.65%)
Amean 79 0.8663 ( 0.00%) 0.8626 ( 0.43%)
Amean 110 1.1543 ( 0.00%) 1.1517 ( 0.22%)
Amean 141 1.4457 ( 0.00%) 1.4290 ( 1.16%)
Amean 172 1.7090 ( 0.00%) 1.6924 ( 0.97%)
Amean 192 1.9126 ( 0.00%) 1.9089 ( 0.19%)
Some small gains and losses and while the variance data is not included,
it's close to the noise. The UMA machine did not show anything particularly
different
pipetest
4.5.0-rc1 4.5.0-rc1
vanilla nostats-v2r2
Min Time 4.13 ( 0.00%) 3.99 ( 3.39%)
1st-qrtle Time 4.38 ( 0.00%) 4.27 ( 2.51%)
2nd-qrtle Time 4.46 ( 0.00%) 4.39 ( 1.57%)
3rd-qrtle Time 4.56 ( 0.00%) 4.51 ( 1.10%)
Max-90% Time 4.67 ( 0.00%) 4.60 ( 1.50%)
Max-93% Time 4.71 ( 0.00%) 4.65 ( 1.27%)
Max-95% Time 4.74 ( 0.00%) 4.71 ( 0.63%)
Max-99% Time 4.88 ( 0.00%) 4.79 ( 1.84%)
Max Time 4.93 ( 0.00%) 4.83 ( 2.03%)
Mean Time 4.48 ( 0.00%) 4.39 ( 1.91%)
Best99%Mean Time 4.47 ( 0.00%) 4.39 ( 1.91%)
Best95%Mean Time 4.46 ( 0.00%) 4.38 ( 1.93%)
Best90%Mean Time 4.45 ( 0.00%) 4.36 ( 1.98%)
Best50%Mean Time 4.36 ( 0.00%) 4.25 ( 2.49%)
Best10%Mean Time 4.23 ( 0.00%) 4.10 ( 3.13%)
Best5%Mean Time 4.19 ( 0.00%) 4.06 ( 3.20%)
Best1%Mean Time 4.13 ( 0.00%) 4.00 ( 3.39%)
Small improvement and similar gains were seen on the UMA machine.
The gain is small but it stands to reason that doing less work in the
scheduler is a good thing. The downside is that the lack of schedstats and
tracepoints may be surprising to experts doing performance analysis until
they find the existence of the schedstats= parameter or schedstats sysctl.
It will be automatically activated for latencytop and sleep profiling to
alleviate the problem. For tracepoints, there is a simple warning as it's
not safe to activate schedstats in the context when it's known the tracepoint
may be wanted but is unavailable.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Reviewed-by: Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk>
Reviewed-by: Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <mgalbraith@suse.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1454663316-22048-1-git-send-email-mgorman@techsingularity.net
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
