Re: [PATCH v4 net-next 2/2] net: introduce budget_squeeze to help us tune rx behavior

[Jesper Dangaard Brouer <jbrouer@redhat.com>]

On 17/03/2023 05.11, Jason Xing wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 11:26 AM Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 17 Mar 2023 10:27:11 +0800 Jason Xing wrote:
>>>> That is the common case, and can be understood from the napi trace
>>>
>>> Thanks for your reply. It is commonly happening every day on many servers.
>>
>> Right but the common issue is the time squeeze, not budget squeeze,
> 
> Most of them are about time, so yes.
> 
>> and either way the budget squeeze doesn't really matter because
>> the softirq loop will call us again soon, if softirq itself is
>> not scheduled out.
>>

I agree, the budget squeeze count doesn't provide much value as it
doesn't indicate something critical (softirq loop will call us again
soon).  The time squeeze event is more critical and something that is
worth monitoring.

I see value in this patch, because it makes it possible monitor the time
squeeze events.  Currently the counter is "polluted" by the budget
squeeze, making it impossible to get a proper time squeeze signal.
Thus, I see this patch as a fix to a old problem.

Acked-by: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>

That said (see below), besides monitoring time squeeze counter, I
recommend adding some BPF monitoring to capture latency issues...

>> So if you want to monitor a meaningful event in your fleet, I think
>> a better event to monitor is the number of times ksoftirqd was woken
>> up and latency of it getting onto the CPU.
> 
> It's a good point. Thanks for your advice.

I'm willing to help you out writing a BPF-based tool that can help you
identify the issue Jakub describe above. Of high latency from when
softIRQ is raised until softIRQ processing runs on the CPU.

I have this bpftrace script[1] available that does just that:

  [1] 
https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-project/blob/master/areas/latency/softirq_net_latency.bt

Perhaps you can take the latency historgrams and then plot a heatmap[2]
in your monitoring platform.

  [2] https://www.brendangregg.com/heatmaps.html

--Jesper