Re: [PATCH (update 3)] timer: Run calc_load halfway through eachround_jiffies second

From: Simon Arlott
Date: Fri Mar 02 2007 - 15:15:44 EST


On 02/03/07 18:03, Eric Dumazet wrote:
On Friday 02 March 2007 18:32, Simon Arlott wrote:
On 02/03/07 16:35, Eric Dumazet wrote:

You could just change LOAD_FREQ from (5*HZ) to (5*HZ+1)
You can see that 5.01 instead of 5.00 second gives the same EXP_xx
values.

So (5*HZ + 1) is safe. (because HZ >= 100)
On HZ=1000, this would cause the load average to be pushed towards +1.00
for up to 2 minutes every ~83 minutes with no obvious cause. (If a task
takes ~10-20ms to run, so 20 runs are needed at HZ=1000 before it passes
it again).

Nope, you dont quite understand how load (avenrun[]) is computed.
Not exactly 1.0 as you think !
Then in the next intervals (if active count is 0), it will decrease 'slowly' : 0.0735627
0.0676809
0.0622695
0.0572907

In average, your load factor close to reality.

I knew that; but the task runs for more than 1 tick and it takes until the next calc_load run before it moves on even 1 tick.

Just try my suggestion, it should work. I even proved it in my previous mail :)

With HZ=1000, the active count will be 1 up to 20 times in a row before it becomes out of sync with when the task is run again. This is ample time for the load value itself to get closer to 1:
$ uptime; (yes>/dev/null &); sleep 100; uptime
20:00:29 up 4:35, 7 users, load average: 0.33, 0.51, 0.78
20:02:09 up 4:37, 7 users, load average: 0.97, 0.67, 0.81
(not very useful results since the load isn't at 0.00 very often)


On 02/03/07 16:35, Eric Dumazet wrote:
I believe this patch is too complex/hazardous and may break exp decay computation.

I still don't know why you think it may change the computation of load (aside from at boot or jiffies wrapping), and it's not really complex at all. It is possible that someone will change the value of LOAD_FREQ to something other than a multiple of HZ and this won't work because it'll get rounded up to a whole second. That and the negligible extra processing time of doing round_jiffies every 5 seconds is the only problem I can see.

I accidentally left LOAD_FREQ at 5 instead of 5*HZ and had a printk in there, it still worked fine aside from the load average going up and down every tick.

--
Simon Arlott
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