Re: problem with nice values and cpu consumption in 2.6.11-5

[Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>]

On Wed, 4 May 2005 00:24, Carlos Carvalho wrote:
> Look at this cpu usage in a two-processor machine:
>
>   893 user1   39  19  7212 5892  492 R 99.7  1.1   3694:29 mi41
>  1118 user2   25   0  155m  61m  624 R 50.0 12.3 857:54.18 b170-se.x
>  1186 user3   25   0  155m  62m  640 R 50.2 12.3 103:25.22 b170-se.x
>
> The job with nice 19 seems to be using 100% of cpu time while the
> other two nice 0 jobs share a single processor with 50% only. This is
> persistent, not a transient. I did a kill -STOP to the nice 19 job and
> a kill -CONT, and for a while it decreased the cpu usage but later
> returned to the above.
>
> This is with kernel 2.6.11-5 and top 3.2.5. What's the reason for this
> (apparent??) mis-behavior and how can I correct it? This is important
> because the machine is used for number-crunching and users get really
> upset when they don't get the expected share of cpu time...

We currently do not have "nice" aware SMP balancing. The balancing is purely 
designed with throughput in mind, and something about the behaviour of the 
tasks you are running makes the scheduler design to balance them in this way. 
The only way around this is to use affinities to bind tasks to cpus. The only 
cross-cpu "nice" awareness we currently have is between hyperthread (SMT) 
logical siblings, and not true physical cores.

I've been experimenting with code to make the SMP balancing "nice" aware but 
the balancing design in the 2.6 scheduler changes every 3 minutes for some 
apparent gain somewhere (it is getting impossible to track these) and there 
is no baseline for me to work off, so I have, for the moment, given up on 
that idea.

Cheers,
Con

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