Re: [regression, 3.16-rc] rwsem: optimistic spinning causing performance degradation

Dave Chinner
2014-07-03T04:59:39Z

On Wed, Jul 02, 2014 at 08:31:08PM -0700, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-07-03 at 12:32 +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > I've got a workload that hammers the mmap_sem via multi-threads
> > memory allocation and page faults: it's called xfs_repair.
>
> Another reason for concurrent address space operations :/

*nod*

> > XFS_REPAIR Summary Thu Jul 3 11:41:28 2014
> >
> > Phase Start End Duration
> > Phase 1: 07/03 11:40:27 07/03 11:40:27
> > Phase 2: 07/03 11:40:27 07/03 11:40:36 9 seconds
> > Phase 3: 07/03 11:40:36 07/03 11:41:12 36 seconds
>
> The *real* degradation is here then.

Yes, as I said, it's in phase 2 and 3 where all the IO and memory
allocation is done.

> > This is what the kernel profile looks like on the strided run:
> >
> > - 83.06% [kernel] [k] osq_lock
> > - osq_lock
> > - 100.00% rwsem_down_write_failed
> > - call_rwsem_down_write_failed
> > - 99.55% sys_mprotect
> > tracesys
> > __GI___mprotect
> > - 12.02% [kernel] [k] rwsem_down_write_failed
> > rwsem_down_write_failed
> > call_rwsem_down_write_failed
> > + 1.09% [kernel] [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
> > + 0.92% [kernel] [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irq
> > + 0.68% [kernel] [k] __do_softirq
> > + 0.33% [kernel] [k] default_send_IPI_mask_sequence_phys
> > + 0.10% [kernel] [k] __do_page_fault
> >
> > Basically, all the kernel time is spent processing lock contention
> > rather than doing real work.
>
> While before it just blocked.

Yup, pretty much - there was contention on the rwsem internal
spinlock, but nothing else burnt CPU time.

> > I haven't tested back on 3.15 yet, but historically the strided AG
> > repair for such filesystems (which I test all the time on 100+500TB
> > filesystem images) is about 20-25% faster on this storage subsystem.
> > Yes, the old code also burnt a lot of CPU due to lock contention,
> > but it didn't go 5x slower than having no threading at all.
> >
> > So this looks like a significant performance regression due to:
> >
> > 4fc828e locking/rwsem: Support optimistic spinning
> >
> > which changed the rwsem behaviour in 3.16-rc1.
>
> So the mmap_sem is held long enough in this workload that the cost of
> blocking is actually significantly smaller than just spinning --

The issues is that the memory allocation pattern alternates between
read and write locks. i.e. write lock on mprotect at allocation,
read lock on page fault when processing the contents. Hence we have
a pretty consistent pattern of allocation (and hence mprotect)
in prefetch threads, while there page faults are in the
processing threads.

> particularly MCS. How many threads are you running when you see the
> issue?

Lots. In phase 3:

$ ps -eLF |grep [x]fs_repair | wc -l
140
$

We use 6 threads per AG being processed:

- 4 metadata prefetch threads (do allocation and IO),
- 1 prefetch control thread
- 1 metadata processing thread (do page faults)

That works out about right - default is to create a new processing
group every 15 AGs, so with 336 AGs we should have roughly 22 AGs
being processed concurrently...

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com