Re: [PATCH] sched: fix sched-domain avg_load calculation.

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, 2011-04-07 at 17:23 -0700, Ken Chen wrote:
> In function find_busiest_group(), the sched-domain avg_load isn't
> calculated at all if there is a group imbalance within the domain.
> This will cause erroneous imbalance calculation.  The reason is
> that calculate_imbalance() sees sds->avg_load = 0 and it will dump
> entire sds->max_load into imbalance variable, which is used later
> on to migrate entire load from busiest CPU to the puller CPU. It
> has two really bad effect:
> 
> 1. stampede of task migration, and they won't be able to break out
>    of the bad state because of positive feedback loop: large load
>    delta -> heavier load migration -> larger imbalance and the cycle
>    goes on.
> 
> 2. severe imbalance in CPU queue depth.  This causes really long
>    scheduling latency blip which affects badly on application that
>    has tight latency requirement.
> 
> The fix is to have kernel calculate domain avg_load in both cases.
> This will ensure that imbalance calculation is always sensible and
> the target is usually half way between busiest and puller CPU.

Indeed so, it looks like I broke that in 866ab43efd32. Out of curiosity,
what kind of workload did you observe this on?

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/