Re: [PATCH 3/3] sched, fair: Stop searching for tasks in newidle balance if there are runnable tasks

[Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>]

On Fri, 2014-04-25 at 04:45 +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-04-24 at 18:52 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote: 
> > On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 09:43:09AM -0700, Jason Low wrote:
> > > If the below patch is what you were referring to, I believe this
> > > can help too. This was also something that I was testing out before
> > > we went with those patches which compares avg_idle with idle balance
> > > cost. I recall seeing somewhere around a +7% performance improvement
> > > in at least least 1 of the AIM7 workloads. I can do some more testing
> > > with this.
> > 
> > Yes, exactly that.
> > 
> > I can't remember the details, but I suspect we feared the less agressive
> > idle balance due to that patch (it will only pull a single task, instead
> > of multiple) would cause more idle_balance invocations and thereby
> > decrease throughput.
> > 
> > So I suppose something with _many_ bursty threads which leads to severe
> > inequalities would be the workload to trigger that.
> > 
> > Not sure we've ever seen that.. maybe Mike remembers, he seems to have a
> > head for such details.
> 
> I don't recall ever seeing such.

Hmmm, could commit: 1b9508f6831e (sched: Rate-limit newidle) be related
to what Peter's referring to? The patch mentioned that the rate-limit
benefited "sysbench oltp".