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authorThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>2016-07-04 09:50:30 +0000
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2016-07-07 10:35:09 +0200
commit500462a9de657f86edaa102f8ab6bff7f7e43fc2 (patch)
tree994ba37694a58f796b8a030dfdf3a3b657e7b246 /block
parentb0d6e2dcb284f1f4dcb4b92760f49eeaf5fc0bc7 (diff)
downloadlinux-500462a9de657f86edaa102f8ab6bff7f7e43fc2.tar.bz2
timers: Switch to a non-cascading wheel
The current timer wheel has some drawbacks: 1) Cascading: Cascading can be an unbound operation and is completely pointless in most cases because the vast majority of the timer wheel timers are canceled or rearmed before expiration. (They are used as timeout safeguards, not as real timers to measure time.) 2) No fast lookup of the next expiring timer: In NOHZ scenarios the first timer soft interrupt after a long NOHZ period must fast forward the base time to the current value of jiffies. As we have no way to find the next expiring timer fast, the code loops linearly and increments the base time one by one and checks for expired timers in each step. This causes unbound overhead spikes exactly in the moment when we should wake up as fast as possible. After a thorough analysis of real world data gathered on laptops, workstations, webservers and other machines (thanks Chris!) I came to the conclusion that the current 'classic' timer wheel implementation can be modified to address the above issues. The vast majority of timer wheel timers is canceled or rearmed before expiry. Most of them are timeouts for networking and other I/O tasks. The nature of timeouts is to catch the exception from normal operation (TCP ack timed out, disk does not respond, etc.). For these kinds of timeouts the accuracy of the timeout is not really a concern. Timeouts are very often approximate worst-case values and in case the timeout fires, we already waited for a long time and performance is down the drain already. The few timers which actually expire can be split into two categories: 1) Short expiry times which expect halfways accurate expiry 2) Long term expiry times are inaccurate today already due to the batching which is done for NOHZ automatically and also via the set_timer_slack() API. So for long term expiry timers we can avoid the cascading property and just leave them in the less granular outer wheels until expiry or cancelation. Timers which are armed with a timeout larger than the wheel capacity are no longer cascaded. We expire them with the longest possible timeout (6+ days). We have not observed such timeouts in our data collection, but at least we handle them, applying the rule of the least surprise. To avoid extending the wheel levels for HZ=1000 so we can accomodate the longest observed timeouts (5 days in the network conntrack code) we reduce the first level granularity on HZ=1000 to 4ms, which effectively is the same as the HZ=250 behaviour. From our data analysis there is nothing which relies on that 1ms granularity and as a side effect we get better batching and timer locality for the networking code as well. Contrary to the classic wheel the granularity of the next wheel is not the capacity of the first wheel. The granularities of the wheels are in the currently chosen setting 8 times the granularity of the previous wheel. So for HZ=250 we end up with the following granularity levels: Level Offset Granularity Range 0 0 4 ms 0 ms - 252 ms 1 64 32 ms 256 ms - 2044 ms (256ms - ~2s) 2 128 256 ms 2048 ms - 16380 ms (~2s - ~16s) 3 192 2048 ms (~2s) 16384 ms - 131068 ms (~16s - ~2m) 4 256 16384 ms (~16s) 131072 ms - 1048572 ms (~2m - ~17m) 5 320 131072 ms (~2m) 1048576 ms - 8388604 ms (~17m - ~2h) 6 384 1048576 ms (~17m) 8388608 ms - 67108863 ms (~2h - ~18h) 7 448 8388608 ms (~2h) 67108864 ms - 536870911 ms (~18h - ~6d) That's a worst case inaccuracy of 12.5% for the timers which are queued at the beginning of a level. So the new wheel concept addresses the old issues: 1) Cascading is avoided completely 2) By keeping the timers in the bucket until expiry/cancelation we can track the buckets which have timers enqueued in a bucket bitmap and therefore can look up the next expiring timer very fast and O(1). A further benefit of the concept is that the slack calculation which is done on every timer start is no longer necessary because the granularity levels provide natural batching already. Our extensive testing with various loads did not show any performance degradation vs. the current wheel implementation. This patch does not address the 'fast lookup' issue as we wanted to make sure that there is no regression introduced by the wheel redesign. The optimizations are in follow up patches. This patch contains fixes from Anna-Maria Gleixner and Richard Cochran. Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> Cc: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> Cc: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com> Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com> Cc: George Spelvin <linux@sciencehorizons.net> Cc: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> Cc: Len Brown <lenb@kernel.org> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: rt@linutronix.de Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160704094342.108621834@linutronix.de Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
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