Re: Performance regression from switching lock to rw-sem for anon-vma tree

[Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>]

On Wed, 2013-06-26 at 11:51 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote: 
> * Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2013-06-19 at 09:53 -0700, Tim Chen wrote: 
> > > On Wed, 2013-06-19 at 15:16 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > 
> > > > > vmstat for mutex implementation: 
> > > > > procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu-----
> > > > >  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
> > > > > 38  0      0 130957920  47860 199956    0    0     0    56 236342 476975 14 72 14  0  0
> > > > > 41  0      0 130938560  47860 219900    0    0     0     0 236816 479676 14 72 14  0  0
> > > > > 
> > > > > vmstat for rw-sem implementation (3.10-rc4)
> > > > > procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu-----
> > > > >  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
> > > > > 40  0      0 130933984  43232 202584    0    0     0     0 321817 690741 13 71 16  0  0
> > > > > 39  0      0 130913904  43232 224812    0    0     0     0 322193 692949 13 71 16  0  0
> > > > 
> > > > It appears the main difference is that the rwsem variant context-switches 
> > > > about 36% more than the mutex version, right?
> > > > 
> > > > I'm wondering how that's possible - the lock is mostly write-locked, 
> > > > correct? So the lock-stealing from Davidlohr Bueso and Michel Lespinasse 
> > > > ought to have brought roughly the same lock-stealing behavior as mutexes 
> > > > do, right?
> > > > 
> > > > So the next analytical step would be to figure out why rwsem lock-stealing 
> > > > is not behaving in an equivalent fashion on this workload. Do readers come 
> > > > in frequently enough to disrupt write-lock-stealing perhaps?
> > 
> > Ingo, 
> > 
> > I did some instrumentation on the write lock failure path.  I found that
> > for the exim workload, there are no readers blocking for the rwsem when
> > write locking failed.  The lock stealing is successful for 9.1% of the
> > time and the rest of the write lock failure caused the writer to go to
> > sleep.  About 1.4% of the writers sleep more than once. Majority of the
> > writers sleep once.
> > 
> > It is weird that lock stealing is not successful more often.
> 
> For this to be comparable to the mutex scalability numbers you'd have to 
> compare wlock-stealing _and_ adaptive spinning for failed-wlock rwsems.
> 
> Are both techniques applied in the kernel you are running your tests on?
> 

Ingo,

The previous experiment was done on a kernel without spinning. 
I've redone the testing on two kernel for a 15 sec stretch of the
workload run.  One with the adaptive (or optimistic) 
spinning and the other without.  Both have the patches from Alex to avoid 
cmpxchg induced cache bouncing.

With the spinning, I sleep much less for lock acquisition (18.6% vs 91.58%).
However, I've got doubling of write lock acquisition getting
blocked.  So that offset the gain from spinning which may be why
I didn't see gain for this particular workload.

						No Opt Spin	Opt Spin
Writer acquisition blocked count		3448946		7359040
Blocked by reader				0.00%		0.55%
Lock acquired first attempt (lock stealing)	8.42%		16.92%
Lock acquired second attempt (1 sleep)		90.26%		17.60%
Lock acquired after more than 1 sleep		1.32%		1.00%
Lock acquired with optimistic spin		N/A		64.48%

Tim



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