Re: Performance regression from switching lock to rw-sem for anon-vma tree

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com> wrote:

> Ingo,
> 
> At the time of switching the anon-vma tree's lock from mutex to 
> rw-sem (commit 5a505085), we encountered regressions for fork heavy workload. 
> A lot of optimizations to rw-sem (e.g. lock stealing) helped to 
> mitigate the problem.  I tried an experiment on the 3.10-rc4 kernel 
> to compare the performance of rw-sem to one that uses mutex. I saw 
> a 8% regression in throughput for rw-sem vs a mutex implementation in
> 3.10-rc4.
> 
> For the experiments, I used the exim mail server workload in 
> the MOSBENCH test suite on 4 socket (westmere) and a 4 socket 
> (ivy bridge) with the number of clients sending mail equal 
> to number of cores.  The mail server will
> fork off a process to handle an incoming mail and put it into mail
> spool. The lock protecting the anon-vma tree is stressed due to
> heavy forking. On both machines, I saw that the mutex implementation 
> has 8% more throughput.  I've pinned the cpu frequency to maximum
> in the experiments.
> 
> I've tried two separate tweaks to the rw-sem on 3.10-rc4.  I've tested 
> each tweak individually.
> 
> 1) Add an owner field when a writer holds the lock and introduce 
> optimistic spinning when an active writer is holding the semaphore.  
> It reduced the context switching by 30% to a level very close to the
> mutex implementation.  However, I did not see any throughput improvement
> of exim.
> 
> 2) When the sem->count's active field is non-zero (i.e. someone
> is holding the lock), we can skip directly to the down_write_failed
> path, without adding the RWSEM_DOWN_WRITE_BIAS and taking
> it off again from sem->count, saving us two atomic operations.
> Since we will try the lock stealing again later, this should be okay.
> Unfortunately it did not improve the exim workload either.  
> 
> Any suggestions on the difference between rwsem and mutex performance
> and possible improvements to recover this regression?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Tim
> 
> vmstat for mutex implementation: 
> procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu-----
>  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
> 38  0      0 130957920  47860 199956    0    0     0    56 236342 476975 14 72 14  0  0
> 41  0      0 130938560  47860 219900    0    0     0     0 236816 479676 14 72 14  0  0
> 
> vmstat for rw-sem implementation (3.10-rc4)
> procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu-----
>  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
> 40  0      0 130933984  43232 202584    0    0     0     0 321817 690741 13 71 16  0  0
> 39  0      0 130913904  43232 224812    0    0     0     0 322193 692949 13 71 16  0  0

It appears the main difference is that the rwsem variant context-switches 
about 36% more than the mutex version, right?

I'm wondering how that's possible - the lock is mostly write-locked, 
correct? So the lock-stealing from Davidlohr Bueso and Michel Lespinasse 
ought to have brought roughly the same lock-stealing behavior as mutexes 
do, right?

So the next analytical step would be to figure out why rwsem lock-stealing 
is not behaving in an equivalent fashion on this workload. Do readers come 
in frequently enough to disrupt write-lock-stealing perhaps?

Context-switch call-graph profiling might shed some light on where the 
extra context switches come from...

Something like:

  perf record -g -e sched:sched_switch --filter 'prev_state != 0' -a sleep 1

or a variant thereof might do the trick.

Thanks,

	Ingo

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