Re: aim7 -30% regression in 2.6.24-rc1

From: Cyrus Massoumi
Date: Thu Nov 01 2007 - 06:03:24 EST


Zhang, Yanmin wrote:
On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:57 +0800, Zhang, Yanmin wrote:
On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 16:36 +0800, Zhang, Yanmin wrote:
On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 08:26 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Zhang, Yanmin <yanmin_zhang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

sub-bisecting captured patch 38ad464d410dadceda1563f36bdb0be7fe4c8938(sched: uniform tunings) caused 20% regression of aim7.

The last 10% should be also related to sched parameters, such like sysctl_sched_min_granularity.
ah, interesting. Since you have CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG enabled, could you please try to figure out what the best value for /proc/sys/kernel_sched_latency, /proc/sys/kernel_sched_nr_latency and /proc/sys/kernel_sched_min_granularity is?

there's a tuning constraint for kernel_sched_nr_latency:

- kernel_sched_nr_latency should always be set to kernel_sched_latency/kernel_sched_min_granularity. (it's not a free tunable)

i suspect a good approach would be to double the value of kernel_sched_latency and kernel_sched_nr_latency in each tuning iteration, while keeping kernel_sched_min_granularity unchanged. That will excercise the tuning values of the 2.6.23 kernel as well.
I followed your idea to test 2.6.24-rc1. The improvement is slow.
When sched_nr_latency=2560 and sched_latency_ns=640000000, the performance
is still about 15% less than 2.6.23.
I got the aim7 30% regression on my new upgraded stoakley machine. I found
this mahcine is slower than the old one. Maybe BIOS has issues, or memeory(Might not
be dual-channel?) is slow. So I retested it on the old machine and found on the old
stoakley machine, the regression is about 6%, quite similiar to the regression on tigerton
machine.

By sched_nr_latency=640 and sched_latency_ns=640000000 on the old stoakley machine,
the regression becomes about 2%. Other latency has more regression.

On my tulsa machine, by sched_nr_latency=640 and sched_latency_ns=640000000,
the regression becomes less than 1% (The original regression is about 20%).
I rerun SPECjbb by ched_nr_latency=640 and sched_latency_ns=640000000. On tigerton,
the regression is still more than 40%. On stoakley machine, it becomes worse (26%,
original is 9%). I will do more investigation to make sure SPECjbb regression is
also casued by the bad default values.

We need a smarter method to calculate the best default values for the key tuning
parameters.

One interesting is sysbench+mysql(readonly) got the same result like 2.6.22 (no
regression). Good job!

Do you mean you couldn't reproduce the regression which was reported with 2.6.23 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/10/30/53) with 2.6.24-rc1? It would be nice if you could provide some numbers for 2.6.22, 2.6.23 and 2.6.24-rc1.

-yanmin

greetings
Cyrus

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