Re: [PATCH v2 12/15] perf record: introduce thread local variable for trace streaming

Alexei Budankov
2020-10-26T08:21:34Z

On 24.10.2020 18:43, Jiri Olsa wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2020 at 07:07:00PM +0300, Alexey Budankov wrote:
>>
>> Introduce thread local variable and use it for threaded trace streaming.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Alexey Budankov <alexey.budankov@linux.intel.com>
>> ---
>> tools/perf/builtin-record.c | 71 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----
>> 1 file changed, 62 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/tools/perf/builtin-record.c b/tools/perf/builtin-record.c
>> index 89cb8e913fb3..3b7e9026f25b 100644
>> --- a/tools/perf/builtin-record.c
>> +++ b/tools/perf/builtin-record.c
>> @@ -101,6 +101,8 @@ struct thread_data {
>> u64 bytes_written;
>> };
>>
>> +static __thread struct thread_data *thread;
>> +
>> struct record {
>> struct perf_tool tool;
>> struct record_opts opts;
>> @@ -587,7 +589,11 @@ static int record__pushfn(struct mmap *map, void *to, void *bf, size_t size)
>> }
>> }
>>
>> - rec->samples++;
>> + if (thread)
>> + thread->samples++;
>> + else
>> + rec->samples++;
>
> this is really wrong, let's keep just single samples counter
> ditto for all the other places in this patch

This does look like data parallelism [1] which is very true for
threaded trace streaming so your prototype design looks optimal.

For this specific place incrementing global counter in memory is
less performant and faces scalability limitations as a number of
cores grow.

Not sure why you have changed your mind.

Alexei

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_parallelism#:~:text=Data%20parallelism%20is%20parallelization%20across,on%20each%20element%20in%20parallel.