Re: [PATCH] kvm: handle last_boosted_vcpu = 0 case

[Andrew Jones]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 04:56:08PM +0530, Raghavendra K T wrote:
> Here are the results from kernbench.
> 
> PS: I think we have to only take that, both the patches perform better,
> than reading into actual numbers since I am seeing more variance in
> especially 3x. may be I can test with some more stable benchmark if
> somebody points
> 

Hi Raghu,

I wonder if we should back up and try to determine the best
benchmark/test environment first. I think kernbench is good, but
I wonder about how to simulate the overcommit, and to what degree
(1x, 3x, ??). What are you currently running to simulate overcommit
now? Originally we were running kernbench in one VM and cpu hogs
(bash infinite loops) in other VMs. Then we added vcpus and infinite
loops to get up to the desired overcommit. I saw later that you've
experimented with running kernbench in the other VMs as well, rather
than cpu hogs. Is that still the case?

I started playing with benchmarking these proposals myself, but so
far have stuck to the cpu hog, since I wanted to keep variability
limited.  However, when targeting a reasonable host loadavg with a
bunch of cpu hog vcpus, it limits the overcommit too much. I certainly
haven't tried 3x this way. So I'm inclined to throw out the cpu hog
approach as well. The question is, what to replace it with? It appears
that the performance of the PLE and pvticketlock proposals are quite
dependant on the level of overcommit, so we should choose a target
overcommit level and also a constraint on the host loadavg first,
then determine how to setup a test environment that fits it and yields
results with low variance.

Here are results from my 1.125x overcommit test environment using
cpu hogs.

kcbench (a.k.a kernbench) results; 'mean-time (stddev)'
  base-noPLE:           235.730 (25.932)
  base-PLE:             238.820 (11.199)
  rand_start-PLE:       283.193 (23.262)
  pvticketlocks-noPLE:  244.987 (7.562)
  pvticketlocks-PLE:    247.597 (17.200)

base kernel:          3.5.0-rc3 + Rik's new last_boosted patch
rand_start kernel:    3.5.0-rc3 + Raghu's proposed random start patch
pvticketlocks kernel: 3.5.0-rc3 + Rik's new last_boosted patch
                                + Raghu's pvticketlock series

The relative standard deviations are as high as 11%. So I'm not
real pleased with the results, and they show degradation everywhere.
Below are the details of the benchmarking. Everything is there except
the kernel config, but our benchmarking should be reproducible with
nearly random configs anyway.

Drew

= host =
  - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X7560 @ 2.27GHz
  - 64 cpus, 4 nodes, 64G mem
  - Fedora 17 with test kernels (see tests)

= benchmark =
  - one cpu hog F17 VM
    - 64 vcpus, 8G mem
    - all vcpus run a bash infinite loop
    - kernel: 3.5.0-rc3
  - one kcbench (a.k.a kernbench) F17 VM
    - 8 vcpus, 8G mem
    - 'kcbench -d /mnt/ram', /mnt/ram is 1G ramfs
    - kcbench-0.3-8.1.noarch, kcbench-data-2.6.38-0.1-9.fc17.noarch,
      kcbench-data-0.1-9.fc17.noarch
    - gcc (GCC) 4.7.0 20120507 (Red Hat 4.7.0-5)
    - kernel: same test kernel as host

= test 1: base, PLE disabled (ple_gap=0) =
  - kernel: 3.5.0-rc3 + Rik's last_boosted patch

Run 1 (-j 16):      4211 (e:237.43 P:637% U:697.98 S:815.46 F:0)
Run 2 (-j 16):      3834 (e:260.77 P:631% U:729.69 S:917.56 F:0)
Run 3 (-j 16):      4784 (e:208.99 P:644% U:638.17 S:708.63 F:0)

mean: 235.730 stddev: 25.932

= test 2: base, PLE enabled =
  - kernel: 3.5.0-rc3 + Rik's last_boosted patch

Run 1 (-j 16):      4335 (e:230.67 P:639% U:657.74 S:818.28 F:0)
Run 2 (-j 16):      4269 (e:234.20 P:647% U:743.43 S:772.52 F:0)
Run 3 (-j 16):      3974 (e:251.59 P:639% U:724.29 S:884.21 F:0)

mean: 238.820 stddev: 11.199

= test 3: rand_start, PLE enabled =
  - kernel: 3.5.0-rc3 + Raghu's random start patch

Run 1 (-j 16):      3898 (e:256.52 P:639% U:756.14 S:884.63 F:0)
Run 2 (-j 16):      3341 (e:299.27 P:633% U:857.49 S:1039.62 F:0)
Run 3 (-j 16):      3403 (e:293.79 P:635% U:857.21 S:1008.83 F:0)

mean: 283.193 stddev: 23.262

= test 4: pvticketlocks, PLE disabled (ple_gap=0) =
  - kernel: 3.5.0-rc3 + Rik's last_boosted patch + Raghu's pvticketlock series
                      + PARAVIRT_SPINLOCKS=y config change

Run 1 (-j 16):      3963 (e:252.29 P:647% U:736.43 S:897.16 F:0)
Run 2 (-j 16):      4216 (e:237.19 P:650% U:706.68 S:837.42 F:0)
Run 3 (-j 16):      4073 (e:245.48 P:649% U:709.46 S:884.68 F:0)

mean: 244.987 stddev: 7.562

= test 5: pvticketlocks, PLE enabled =
  - kernel: 3.5.0-rc3 + Rik's last_boosted patch + Raghu's pvticketlock series
                      + PARAVIRT_SPINLOCKS=y config change

Run 1 (-j 16):      3978 (e:251.32 P:629% U:758.86 S:824.29 F:0)
Run 2 (-j 16):      4369 (e:228.84 P:634% U:708.32 S:743.71 F:0)
Run 3 (-j 16):      3807 (e:262.63 P:626% U:767.03 S:877.96 F:0)

mean: 247.597 stddev: 17.200
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