Re: [PATCH] Load balancing problem in 2.6.2-mm1

Rick Lindsley
2004-02-06T18:18:32Z

Good stuff, I just gave the patch a spin and things seem a little
calmer. However Im still seeing a lot of balancing going on within a
node.

This is a clearly recognizable edge case, so I'll try drawing this up on
some paper and see if I can suggest another patch. There's no good reason
to move one lone process from a particular processor to another idle one.

But it also approaches a question that's come up before: if you have 2
tasks on processor A and 1 on processor B, do you move one from A to B?
One argument is that the two tasks on A will take twice as long as
the one on B if you do nothing. But another says that bouncing a task
around can't correct the overall imbalance and so is wasteful. I know
of benchmarks where both behaviors are considered important. Thoughts?

Rick