Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: High priority threads causing severe CPU load imbalances | From | Peter Zijlstra <> | Date | Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:08:10 +0200 |
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On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 18:42 +0530, Suresh Jayaraman wrote: > I have a simple test program that accepts number of threads(pthreads) to > be created as a input. Each of these threads that gets created invokes a > function which is just a infinite while loop. The main function after > creating those threads goes in a infinite loop itself > > My test machine is a Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) 860 with 8 > sockets(non-HT), I run this test program with number of threads == > number of CPUs: > > ./loadcpu -t 16 > > I see 100% CPU utilization on almost all CPUs (via mpstat/htop/vmstat). > > When the above threads are running, if I introduce a few high priority > threads by doing: > > nice -n -13 ./loadcpu -t 3 > > After a short while, I see a few CPUs becoming idle at ~0% utilization > (the number of CPUs becoming idle equals roughly the number of high > priority threads i.e. 3). When I stop the high priority threads, the CPU > utilization comes back to normal i.e. ~100%. > > This is reproducible on 2.6.32.10 stable kernel with all the recent all > SMT fixes (I hope) and I think it would be reproducible in current > upstream as well.
Why bother using -stable for reporting bugs?
> sched_mc_power_savings has been always set to 0. > > I spent a while staring at the load balancing and the thread migration > code, but could not figure out why this is happening. Would appreciate > any pointers.
Right, except its not a severe imbalance as the subject suggests. For some reason it seems to end up in a semi-stable state that is actually quite balanced.
for ((i=0; i<8; i++)) do while :; do :; done & done for ((i=0; i<3; i++)) do while :; do :; done & renice -n -15 -p $! ; done
gets me:
Cpu0 :100.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 :100.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 :100.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu3 :100.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu4 : 99.0%us, 1.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu5 :100.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu6 :100.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu7 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 16440840k total, 1073672k used, 15367168k free, 105844k buffers Swap: 16777212k total, 0k used, 16777212k free, 296504k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 4370 root 5 -15 105m 804 304 R 100.1 0.0 0:45.02 bash 4374 root 5 -15 105m 804 304 R 100.1 0.0 0:44.95 bash 4372 root 5 -15 105m 804 304 R 99.1 0.0 0:45.00 bash 4364 root 20 0 105m 804 304 R 51.0 0.0 0:33.06 bash 4362 root 20 0 105m 800 300 R 50.0 0.0 0:33.17 bash 4365 root 20 0 105m 804 304 R 50.0 0.0 0:33.75 bash 4368 root 20 0 105m 804 304 R 50.0 0.0 0:33.32 bash 4369 root 20 0 105m 804 304 R 50.0 0.0 0:33.38 bash 4363 root 20 0 105m 804 304 R 49.1 0.0 0:33.65 bash 4366 root 20 0 105m 804 304 R 49.1 0.0 0:33.29 bash 4367 root 20 0 105m 804 304 R 49.1 0.0 0:33.54 bash
So we have the 3 -15 loops on a cpu each, and the 8 0 loops on 2 cpus each, and 1 cpu idle. That is actually quite balanced, 'better' would be if those 0 loops would rotate over the 5 available cpus, but that would also trash more caches I guess.
I'm not quite sure what makes the load-balancer end up in this situation though, but I suspect the various imbalance_pct things might have something to do with it.
It doesn't always end up in this state either, if you only start 2 -15 loops its a roll of the dice on what happens, sometimes it ends up with the 6 cpus cycling the 2 extra tasks around, sometimes its 1 cpu idle with cycling 1 task.
Unexpected, maybe, severe imbalance, no. Would be nice to get it to be a little more stable behaviour though.
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