Re: [PATCH v5 00/14] epoll: support pollable epoll from userspace

[Roman Penyaev <rpenyaev@suse.de>]

On 2019-06-24 22:38, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 10:42 PM Roman Penyaev <rpenyaev@suse.de> 
> wrote:
>> 
>> So harvesting events from userspace gives 15% gain.  Though bench_http
>> is not ideal benchmark, but at least it is the part of libevent and 
>> was
>> easy to modify.
>> 
>> Worth to mention that uepoll is very sensible to CPU, e.g. the gain 
>> above
>> is observed on desktop "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz", 
>> but on
>> "Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4110 CPU @ 2.10GHz" measurements are almost 
>> the
>> same for both runs.
> 
> Hmm. 15% may be big in a big picture thing, but when it comes to what
> is pretty much a micro-benchmark, I'm not sure how meaningful it is.
> 
> And the CPU sensitivity thing worries me. Did you check _why_ it
> doesn't seem to make any difference on the Xeon 4110? Is it just
> because at that point the machine has enough cores that you might as
> well just sit in epoll() in the kernel and uepoll doesn't give you
> much? Or is there something else going on?

This http tool is a singlethreaded test, i.e. client and server
work as a standalone processes and each has a single event thread
for everything.

According to what I saw there, is that events come slowly (or event
loop acts faster?), so when time has come to harvest events there
is nothing, we take a slow path and go to kernel in order to sleep.
That does not explain the main "why", unfortunately.

I would like to retest that adding more clients to the server, thus
server is more likely to observe events in a ring, avoiding sleep.

--
Roman