Re: [PATCH v4] ipc/msg: mitigate the lock contention with percpu counter

Tim Chen
2022-09-07T16:05:54Z

On Thu, 2022-09-08 at 01:25 +0800, Jiebin Sun wrote:
> The msg_bytes and msg_hdrs atomic counters are frequently
> updated when IPC msg queue is in heavy use, causing heavy
> cache bounce and overhead. Change them to percpu_counter
> greatly improve the performance. Since there is one percpu
> struct per namespace, additional memory cost is minimal.
> Reading of the count done in msgctl call, which is infrequent.
> So the need to sum up the counts in each CPU is infrequent.
>
>
> Apply the patch and test the pts/stress-ng-1.4.0
> -- system v message passing (160 threads).
>
> Score gain: 3.17x
>
>
...
>
> +/* large batch size could reduce the times to sum up percpu counter */
> +#define MSG_PERCPU_COUNTER_BATCH 1024
> +

Jiebin,

1024 is a small size (1/4 page).
The local per cpu counter could overflow to the gloabal count quickly
if it is limited to this size, since our count tracks msg size.

I'll suggest something larger, say 8*1024*1024, about
8MB to accommodate about 2 large page worth of data. Maybe that
will further improve throughput on stress-ng by reducing contention
on adding to the global count.

Tim