Re: kdbus: to merge or not to merge?

Andy Lutomirski
2015-08-06T15:28:01Z

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Daniel Mack <daniel@zonque.org> wrote:
> Hi Andy,
>
> On 08/05/2015 02:18 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> I added the missing sd_bus_unref call.
>>
>> With userspace dbus, my program takes 95% CPU and dbus-daemon takes
>> 88% CPU or so.
>>
>> With kdbus, I see abuse-bus (my test), systemd-journald,
>> systemd-bus-proxy, auditd, gnome-shell, mission-control, sedispatch,
>> firewalld, polkitd, NetworkManager, systemd, avahi-daemon, audisp,
>> abrt-dump-jour* (whatever it's called -- it truncated), upowerd, and
>> systemd-logind all taking tons of CPU. I've listed them in decreasing
>> order of amount of CPU burned -- the top several are taking about as
>> much as is possible. Load average is over 13. That's if I run it
>> from a text console while I'm logged in to gnome in a different VT.
>
> That's right, I can reproduce this here. To explain what's going on, let
> me provide some background.
>
> Every time a client connects to kdbus, a new ID is assigned to the
> connection, and other connections which have previously subscribed to
> notifications of type KDBUS_ITEM_ID_ADD or _REMOVE get a notification
> and are woken up so they can dispatch it. By default, no such matches
> exists, applicaions have to explicitly opt-in if they are interested in
> these events.
>
> In DBus (both kdbus and DBus1), such matches are installed on the
> NameOwnerChanged signal, and they can be either specific to a single ID,
> or broad, which will make them match on any ID. There's actually no
> reason for applications to install unspecific matches, but if they do,
> they will of course get what they asked for, and are woken up on every
> ID that is added to or removed from the bus. What you're seeing in your
> system profile is that some applications misbehave and install
> unspecific matches when they shouldn't. That's a userspace bug that
> needs fixing. Two candidates were actually in the systemd code base
> (logind and PID1), and both are now patched.

Can you point me at the patch?

It sounds like that will reduce the scalability issue with this
particular test from whatever userspace overhead exists * number of
clients to just the overhead of looping over all clients and their
matches in the kernel.

--Andy