Re: [Patch][RFC] Disabling per-tgid stats on task exit in taskstats

[Shailabh Nagar <nagar@watson.ibm.com>]

jamal wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-29-06 at 16:01 -0400, Shailabh Nagar wrote:
>
>  
>
> > Jamal,
> > any thoughts on the flow control capabilities of netlink that apply here 
> > ? Usage of the connection is to supply statistics data to userspace.
> >
> >    
>
> if you want reliable delivery, then you cant just depend on async events
> from the kernel -> user - which i am assuming is the way stats get
> delivered as processes exit? 
Yes.

> Sorry, i dont remember the details. You
> need some synchronous scheme to ask the kernel to do a "get" or "dump".
>  
Oh, yes. Dump is synchronous. So it won't be useful unless we buffer 
task exit records within
taskstats.

> Lets be clear about one thing:
> The problem really has nothing to do with gen/netlink or any other
> scheme you use;->
> It has everything to do with reliability implications and the fact
> that you need to assume memory is a finite resource - at one point
> or another you will run out of memory ;-> And of course then messages
> will be lost.  So for gen/netlink, just make sure you have large socket
> buffer and you would most likely be fine. 
> I havent seen how the numbers were reached: But if you say you receive
> 14K exits/sec each of which is a 50B message, I would think a 1M socket
> buffer would be plenty.
>  
The rates (or upper bounds) that are being discussed here, as of now, 
are 1000 exits/sec/CPU for
1024 CPU systems. That would be roughly 1M exits/system * 
248Bytes/message  = 248 MB/sec.

> You can find out about lack of memory in netlink when you get a ENOBUFS.
> As an example, you should then do a kernel query. Clearly if you do a
> query of that sort, you may not want to find obsolete info. Therefore,
> as a suggestion, you may want to keep sequence numbers of sorts as
> markers. Perhaps keep a 32-bit field which monotically increases per
> process exit or use the pid as the sequence number etc..
>
> As for throttling - Shailabh, I think we talked about this:
> - You could maintain info using some thresholds and timer. Then
> when a timer expires or threshold is exceeded send to user space.
>  
Hmm. So we could buffer the per-task exit data within taskstats (the mem 
consumption would grow
but thats probably not a problem) and then send it out later.

Jay - would not getting exit data soon after exit be a problem for CSA ? 
I'm guessing not, if the
timeout is kept small enough. Internally, taskstats could always pace 
its sends so that "too much"
isn't sent out at one shot.

--Shailabh


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