Re: Schedulers benchmark - Was: [ANNOUNCE][RFC] PlugSched-5.2.4 for 2.6.12 and 2.6.13-rc6

[Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>]

On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 09:15 am, Peter Williams wrote:
> Con Kolivas wrote:
> > On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 18:10, Peter Williams wrote:
> >>Michal Piotrowski wrote:
> >>>Hi,
> >>>here are schedulers benchmark (part2):
> >>>[bits deleted]
> >>
> >>Here's a summary of your output generated using the attached Python
> >> script.
> >>
> >>              |         Build Statistics | Overall Statistics
> >>
> >>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>     Scheduler|   Real    CPU  SYS   TPT |    CPU   TPT    delay    CXSW
> >>
> >>              | (secs) (secs)  (%)   (%) | (secs)   (%)  (secs)
> >>
> >>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>     ingosched| 3128.5 5056.3 8.18 161.6 | 5379.5 171.9 159367.4 1556452
> >>     staircase| 3131.2 5032.6 8.09 160.7 | 5352.9 170.9 135193.0 1670366
> >>spa_no_frills| 3103.8 5049.5 7.98 162.7 | 5266.7 169.7 172384.8  520937
> >>   zaphod(d,d)| 3561.7 4823.8 9.25 135.4 | 5132.0 144.1 148361.5 1771617
> >>   zaphod(d,0)| 3551.2 4809.9 9.19 135.4 | 5114.7 144.0 144022.0 1784814
> >>   zaphod(0,d)| 3126.8 5063.2 8.11 161.9 | 5278.1 168.8 173438.4  573587
> >>   zaphod(0,0)| 3105.5 5052.9 7.98 162.7 | 5254.8 169.2 165774.4  577534
> >>     nicksched| 3294.7 5095.1 9.10 154.6 | 5425.4 164.6 104298.2 2205665
> >>
> >>where the (x,y) after zaphod means (max_ia_bonus, max_tpt_bonus) and "d"
> >>means default.  I had to kill a few significant digits to squeeze it
> >>into 71 columns.  Overall statistics are extracted from the schedstats
> >>data.  In the "Build Statistics" "CPU" is the sum of the user and sys
> >>times and "SYS" is the percentage of that which was sys time (as I feel
> >>that is a better thing to compare than raw sys times).
> >>
> >>I was intrigued by the fact that zaphod(d,d) and zaphod(d,0) take longer
> >>in real time but use less cpu.  I was assuming that this meant that some
> >>other job was getting some cpu but the schedstats data doesn't support
> >>that.  Also it wouldn't make sense anyway as you'd expect jobs doing the
> >>same amount of work to use roughly the same amount of cpu.  My latest
> >>theory is that your machine has hyper threads and this artifact is
> >>caused by the mechanism in the scheduler for handling tasks with
> >>differing priority in sibling hyper thread channels.  Does your system
> >>have hyper threads?
> >
> > That would only do something if there was a difference in 'nice' levels.
>
> Not in zaphod and spa_no_frills.  They user dynamic priority.  I may
> rethink this as the argument for using dynamic priority mainly applies
> to the entitlement based mode of zaphod.

Static - like mainline and staircase - would be a good idea as the whole point 
of hyperthread-aware 'nice' levels is they obey 'nice', not dynamic priority.

>
> > What
> > you're seeing is the fact that balancing is intimately tied in with
> > timeslice size and you have increased idle time.
>
> I partially agree in that reducing the time slice size would reduce the
> size of the effect but it's not the cause of the effect.  The hyper
> threading code is the cause.
>
> BTW  I'm wondering why the TPT column (i.e. cpu time / real elapsed
> time) is so low for all schedulers.  It's been a long time since I ran
> your "contest" benchmarks for any of these schedulers but I seem to
> recall that they all did a lot better than this when I extracted the
> equivalent data from the output.  Generally, I think that they all used
> greater than 95% of the available cpu time which would be the equivalent
> of TPT values of 190% or more in this case.

He did a make allyesconfig which is a bit different and probably far too i/o 
bound. By the way a single kernel compile is hardly a reproducible benchmark. 
Ideally he should be using my 'kernbench' benchmark (hint hint).

> Another interesting thing to be noted in these numbers is that the cost
> of the extra context switches caused by the "improved interactive
> performance" measures doesn't seem to be very significant.

I doubt this workload is running into that, the i/o bound nature of a kernel 
compile means it is not really a pure cpu usage scalability measure, it's 
just easy to do. Check the lkml archives for some comments by WLIrwin on the 
limitations of using kernbench as a scalability measure.

Cheers,
Con
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