Re: High lock spin time for zone->lru_lock under extreme conditions

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Ravikiran G Thirumalai wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 13, 2007 at 03:39:45PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:

> > What is the "CS time"?
>
>
> Critical Section :).  This is the maximal time interval I measured  from 
> t2 above to the time point we release the spin lock.  This is the hold 
> time I guess.
>
>
> > It would be interesting to know how long the maximal lru_lock *hold* time 
> > is,
> > which could give us a better indication of whether it is a hardware problem.
> >
> > For example, if the maximum hold time is 10ms, that it might indicate a
> > hardware fairness problem.
>
>
> The maximal hold time was about 3s.

Well then it doesn't seem very surprising that this could cause a 30s wait
time for one CPU in a 16 core system, regardless of fairness.

I guess most of the contention, and the lock hold times are coming from
vmscan? Do you know exactly which critical sections are the culprits?

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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