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authorGreg Banks <gnb@sgi.com>2009-01-13 21:26:35 +1100
committerJ. Bruce Fields <bfields@citi.umich.edu>2009-03-18 17:38:41 -0400
commit59a252ff8c0f2fa32c896f69d56ae33e641ce7ad (patch)
treef79089d44737e5f050cc4869b42829650096747f /include/linux/sunrpc
parent8bbfa9f3889b643fc7de82c0c761ef17097f8faf (diff)
knfsd: avoid overloading the CPU scheduler with enormous load averages
Avoid overloading the CPU scheduler with enormous load averages when handling high call-rate NFS loads. When the knfsd bottom half is made aware of an incoming call by the socket layer, it tries to choose an nfsd thread and wake it up. As long as there are idle threads, one will be woken up. If there are lot of nfsd threads (a sensible configuration when the server is disk-bound or is running an HSM), there will be many more nfsd threads than CPUs to run them. Under a high call-rate low service-time workload, the result is that almost every nfsd is runnable, but only a handful are actually able to run. This situation causes two significant problems: 1. The CPU scheduler takes over 10% of each CPU, which is robbing the nfsd threads of valuable CPU time. 2. At a high enough load, the nfsd threads starve userspace threads of CPU time, to the point where daemons like portmap and rpc.mountd do not schedule for tens of seconds at a time. Clients attempting to mount an NFS filesystem timeout at the very first step (opening a TCP connection to portmap) because portmap cannot wake up from select() and call accept() in time. Disclaimer: these effects were observed on a SLES9 kernel, modern kernels' schedulers may behave more gracefully. The solution is simple: keep in each svc_pool a counter of the number of threads which have been woken but have not yet run, and do not wake any more if that count reaches an arbitrary small threshold. Testing was on a 4 CPU 4 NIC Altix using 4 IRIX clients, each with 16 synthetic client threads simulating an rsync (i.e. recursive directory listing) workload reading from an i386 RH9 install image (161480 regular files in 10841 directories) on the server. That tree is small enough to fill in the server's RAM so no disk traffic was involved. This setup gives a sustained call rate in excess of 60000 calls/sec before being CPU-bound on the server. The server was running 128 nfsds. Profiling showed schedule() taking 6.7% of every CPU, and __wake_up() taking 5.2%. This patch drops those contributions to 3.0% and 2.2%. Load average was over 120 before the patch, and 20.9 after. This patch is a forward-ported version of knfsd-avoid-nfsd-overload which has been shipping in the SGI "Enhanced NFS" product since 2006. It has been posted before: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.nfs/10374 Signed-off-by: Greg Banks <gnb@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@citi.umich.edu>
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux/sunrpc')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/sunrpc/svc.h2
1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/sunrpc/svc.h b/include/linux/sunrpc/svc.h
index 3435d24bfe5..39ec186a492 100644
--- a/include/linux/sunrpc/svc.h
+++ b/include/linux/sunrpc/svc.h
@@ -41,6 +41,7 @@ struct svc_pool {
struct list_head sp_sockets; /* pending sockets */
unsigned int sp_nrthreads; /* # of threads in pool */
struct list_head sp_all_threads; /* all server threads */
+ int sp_nwaking; /* number of threads woken but not yet active */
} ____cacheline_aligned_in_smp;
/*
@@ -264,6 +265,7 @@ struct svc_rqst {
* cache pages */
wait_queue_head_t rq_wait; /* synchronization */
struct task_struct *rq_task; /* service thread */
+ int rq_waking; /* 1 if thread is being woken */
};
/*