Re: [REPORT] 2.6.21.1 vs 2.6.21-sd046 vs 2.6.21-cfs-v6

[Michael Gerdau <mgd@technosis.de>]

> regarding the fairness of the different schedulers, please note the 
> different runtimes for each component of the workload:
> 
>      LTMM:   5655.07/ 5682
>      LTMB:   7729.81/ 7755
>      LTBM:   7720.70/ 7746
> 
> this means that a fair scheduler would _not_ be the one that finishes 
> them first on wall-clock time (!). A fair scheduler would run each of 
> them at 33% capacity until the fastest one (LTMM) reaches ~5650 seconds 
> runtime and finishes, and _then_ the remaining ~2050 seconds of runtime 
> would be done at 50%/50% capacity between the remaining two jobs. I.e. 
> the fair wall-clock results should be around:
> 
>     LTMM:  ~8500 seconds
>     LTMB: ~10600 seconds 
>     LTBM: ~10600 seconds
> 
> (but the IO portion of the workloads and other scheduling effects could 
> easily shift these numbers by a few minutes.)

Correct. I will try to cook up some statistics for the next round
of results (been redoing cfs-v6, done cfs-v7 and then redone it
because of strange results and hopefully will do cfs-v8 tonight
as well as sd048 during the next days -- not easy to keep up with
you guys rolling out new versions ;-)

> regarding the results: it seems the wallclock portion of LTMM/j3 is too 
> small - even though the 3 tasks ran in parallel, in the CFS test LTMM 
> finished just as fast as if it were running alone, right?

Right. I'm really very surprised but this remained while redoing both
LTMM/j1 (twice!) and LTMM/j3 with cfs-v6.

I don't really understand that and now think it shows some hidden
"fairness deficiency" that hopefully is corrected in cfs-v8. At least
cfs-v7 did behave differently.

> That does not  
> seem to be logical and indeed suggests some sort of testing artifact.

Since it doesn't appear with any other scheduler tested I'd not rule
out a feature of the code.

> That makes it hard to judge which scheduler achieved the above 'ideal 
> fair distribution' of the workloads better - for some of the results it 
> was SD, for some it was CFS - but the missing LTMM/j3 number makes it 
> hard to decide it conclusively. They are certainly both close enough and 
> the noise of the results seems quite high.

Oh, I'm confident both are excellent scheduler. On the other hand
I find mainline isn't that bad either, at least for this type of
load.

Anyway, as I wrote above I'm continuing my tests and am collecting
data for the various scheduler. Presumably over the weekend I'll
mail out the next round.

Best,
Michael
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