Re: Schedulers benchmark - Was: [ANNOUNCE][RFC] PlugSched-5.2.4 for 2.6.12 and 2.6.13-rc6

[Peter Williams <pwil3058@bigpond.net.au>]

Con Kolivas wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 09:15 am, Peter Williams wrote:
> 
>>Con Kolivas wrote:
>>
>>>On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 18:10, Peter Williams wrote:
>>>
>>>>Michal Piotrowski wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Hi,
>>>>>here are schedulers benchmark (part2):
>>>>>[bits deleted]
>>>>
>>>>Here's a summary of your output generated using the attached Python
>>>>script.
>>>>
>>>>             |         Build Statistics | Overall Statistics
>>>>
>>>>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>    Scheduler|   Real    CPU  SYS   TPT |    CPU   TPT    delay    CXSW
>>>>
>>>>             | (secs) (secs)  (%)   (%) | (secs)   (%)  (secs)
>>>>
>>>>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>    ingosched| 3128.5 5056.3 8.18 161.6 | 5379.5 171.9 159367.4 1556452
>>>>    staircase| 3131.2 5032.6 8.09 160.7 | 5352.9 170.9 135193.0 1670366
>>>>spa_no_frills| 3103.8 5049.5 7.98 162.7 | 5266.7 169.7 172384.8  520937
>>>>  zaphod(d,d)| 3561.7 4823.8 9.25 135.4 | 5132.0 144.1 148361.5 1771617
>>>>  zaphod(d,0)| 3551.2 4809.9 9.19 135.4 | 5114.7 144.0 144022.0 1784814
>>>>  zaphod(0,d)| 3126.8 5063.2 8.11 161.9 | 5278.1 168.8 173438.4  573587
>>>>  zaphod(0,0)| 3105.5 5052.9 7.98 162.7 | 5254.8 169.2 165774.4  577534
>>>>    nicksched| 3294.7 5095.1 9.10 154.6 | 5425.4 164.6 104298.2 2205665
>>>>
>>>>where the (x,y) after zaphod means (max_ia_bonus, max_tpt_bonus) and "d"
>>>>means default.  I had to kill a few significant digits to squeeze it
>>>>into 71 columns.  Overall statistics are extracted from the schedstats
>>>>data.  In the "Build Statistics" "CPU" is the sum of the user and sys
>>>>times and "SYS" is the percentage of that which was sys time (as I feel
>>>>that is a better thing to compare than raw sys times).
>>>>
>>>>I was intrigued by the fact that zaphod(d,d) and zaphod(d,0) take longer
>>>>in real time but use less cpu.  I was assuming that this meant that some
>>>>other job was getting some cpu but the schedstats data doesn't support
>>>>that.  Also it wouldn't make sense anyway as you'd expect jobs doing the
>>>>same amount of work to use roughly the same amount of cpu.  My latest
>>>>theory is that your machine has hyper threads and this artifact is
>>>>caused by the mechanism in the scheduler for handling tasks with
>>>>differing priority in sibling hyper thread channels.  Does your system
>>>>have hyper threads?
>>>
>>>That would only do something if there was a difference in 'nice' levels.
>>
>>Not in zaphod and spa_no_frills.  They user dynamic priority.  I may
>>rethink this as the argument for using dynamic priority mainly applies
>>to the entitlement based mode of zaphod.
> 
> 
> Static - like mainline and staircase - would be a good idea as the whole point 
> of hyperthread-aware 'nice' levels is they obey 'nice', not dynamic priority.

Yes, but when zaphod's in "entitlement based" mode dynamic priority is a 
better measure of "nice".  But I think I'll modify spa_no_frills and 
zaphod in "priority based" mode to use static priority (as you suggest).

> 
> 
>>>What
>>>you're seeing is the fact that balancing is intimately tied in with
>>>timeslice size and you have increased idle time.
>>
>>I partially agree in that reducing the time slice size would reduce the
>>size of the effect but it's not the cause of the effect.  The hyper
>>threading code is the cause.
>>
>>BTW  I'm wondering why the TPT column (i.e. cpu time / real elapsed
>>time) is so low for all schedulers.  It's been a long time since I ran
>>your "contest" benchmarks for any of these schedulers but I seem to
>>recall that they all did a lot better than this when I extracted the
>>equivalent data from the output.  Generally, I think that they all used
>>greater than 95% of the available cpu time which would be the equivalent
>>of TPT values of 190% or more in this case.
> 
> 
> He did a make allyesconfig which is a bit different and probably far too i/o 
> bound. By the way a single kernel compile is hardly a reproducible benchmark. 
> Ideally he should be using my 'kernbench' benchmark (hint hint).

Is that what I meant when I said "contest"?  I wasn't sure that I used 
the right name.

> 
> 
>>Another interesting thing to be noted in these numbers is that the cost
>>of the extra context switches caused by the "improved interactive
>>performance" measures doesn't seem to be very significant.
> 
> 
> I doubt this workload is running into that, the i/o bound nature of a kernel 
> compile means it is not really a pure cpu usage scalability measure, it's 
> just easy to do. Check the lkml archives for some comments by WLIrwin on the 
> limitations of using kernbench as a scalability measure.

I should have calculated the average cpu consumption per context switch. 
  If that's reasonably large then the number of context switches won't 
matter much.  It's probably more a interesting number than the count of 
context switches so I'll alter the script accordingly.

I would have liked to have done more analysis of the load balancing but 
some of the schedstats data was corrupt.  It should be roughly the same 
for all schedulers if my attempts to make scheduling and load balancing 
orthogonal have been successful.  I was thinking of doing something 
equivalent to a Chi-squared test to get a single number that describes 
how good load balancing has been.

Peter
-- 
Peter Williams                                   pwil3058@bigpond.net.au

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."
  -- Ambrose Bierce