On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 01:55:03AM +0200, Michal Kubecek wrote:
On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 05:29:46PM +0200, Michal Kubecek wrote:
As pointed out in the discussion on v3, this patch may result in significantly higher CPU consumption with multiple threads competing on a saturated outgoing device. I missed this submission so that I haven't checked it yet but given the description of v3->v4 changes above, it's quite likely that it suffers from the same problem.
And it indeed does. However, with the additional patch from the v3 discussion, the numbers are approximately the same as with an unpatched mainline kernel.
As with v4, I tried this patch on top of 5.12-rc7 with real devices. I used two machines with 10Gb/s Intel ixgbe NICs, sender has 16 CPUs (2 8-core CPUs with HT disabled) and 16 Rx/Tx queues, receiver has 48 CPUs (2 12-core CPUs with HT enabled) and 48 Rx/Tx queues.
threads 5.12-rc7 5.12-rc7 + v4 5.12-rc7 + v4 + stop 1 25.1% 38.1% 22.9% 8 66.2% 277.0% 74.1% 16 90.1% 150.7% 91.0% 32 107.2% 272.6% 108.3% 64 116.3% 487.5% 118.1% 128 126.1% 946.7% 126.9%
(The values are normalized to one core, i.e. 100% corresponds to one fully used logical CPU.)
I repeated the tests few more times and with more iterations and it seems the problem rather was that the CPU utilization numbers are not very stable, in particular with number of connections/threads close to the number of CPUs and Tx queues. Refined results (and also other tests) show that full 3-patch series performs similar to unpatched 5.12-rc7 (within the margin of statistical error).
However, I noticed something disturbing in the results of a simple 1-thread TCP_STREAM test (client sends data through a TCP connection to server using long writes, we measure the amount of data received by the server):
server: 172.17.1.1, port 12543 iterations: 20, threads: 1, test length: 30 test: TCP_STREAM, message size: 1048576
1 927403548.4 B/s, avg 927403548.4 B/s, mdev 0.0 B/s ( 0.0%) 2 1176317172.1 B/s, avg 1051860360.2 B/s, mdev 124456811.8 B/s ( 11.8%), confid. +/- 1581348251.3 B/s (150.3%) 3 927335837.8 B/s, avg 1010352186.1 B/s, mdev 117354970.3 B/s ( 11.6%), confid. +/- 357073677.2 B/s ( 35.3%) 4 1176728045.1 B/s, avg 1051946150.8 B/s, mdev 124576544.7 B/s ( 11.8%), confid. +/- 228863127.8 B/s ( 21.8%) 5 1176788216.3 B/s, avg 1076914563.9 B/s, mdev 122102985.3 B/s ( 11.3%), confid. +/- 169478943.5 B/s ( 15.7%) 6 1158167055.1 B/s, avg 1090456645.8 B/s, mdev 115504209.5 B/s ( 10.6%), confid. +/- 132805140.8 B/s ( 12.2%) 7 1176243474.4 B/s, avg 1102711907.0 B/s, mdev 111069717.1 B/s ( 10.1%), confid. +/- 110956822.2 B/s ( 10.1%) 8 1176771142.8 B/s, avg 1111969311.5 B/s, mdev 106744173.5 B/s ( 9.6%), confid. +/- 95417120.0 B/s ( 8.6%) 9 1176206364.6 B/s, avg 1119106761.8 B/s, mdev 102644185.2 B/s ( 9.2%), confid. +/- 83685200.5 B/s ( 7.5%) 10 1175888409.4 B/s, avg 1124784926.6 B/s, mdev 98855550.5 B/s ( 8.8%), confid. +/- 74537085.1 B/s ( 6.6%) 11 1176541407.6 B/s, avg 1129490061.2 B/s, mdev 95422224.8 B/s ( 8.4%), confid. +/- 67230249.7 B/s ( 6.0%) 12 934185352.8 B/s, avg 1113214668.9 B/s, mdev 106114984.5 B/s ( 9.5%), confid. +/- 70420712.5 B/s ( 6.3%) 13 1176550558.1 B/s, avg 1118086660.3 B/s, mdev 103339448.9 B/s ( 9.2%), confid. +/- 65002902.4 B/s ( 5.8%) 14 1176521808.8 B/s, avg 1122260599.5 B/s, mdev 100711151.3 B/s ( 9.0%), confid. +/- 60333655.0 B/s ( 5.4%) 15 1176744840.8 B/s, avg 1125892882.3 B/s, mdev 98240838.2 B/s ( 8.7%), confid. +/- 56319052.3 B/s ( 5.0%) 16 1176593778.5 B/s, avg 1129061688.3 B/s, mdev 95909740.8 B/s ( 8.5%), confid. +/- 52771633.5 B/s ( 4.7%) 17 1176583967.4 B/s, avg 1131857116.5 B/s, mdev 93715582.2 B/s ( 8.3%), confid. +/- 49669258.6 B/s ( 4.4%) 18 1176853301.8 B/s, avg 1134356904.5 B/s, mdev 91656530.2 B/s ( 8.1%), confid. +/- 46905244.8 B/s ( 4.1%) 19 1176592845.7 B/s, avg 1136579848.8 B/s, mdev 89709043.8 B/s ( 7.9%), confid. +/- 44424855.9 B/s ( 3.9%) 20 1176608117.3 B/s, avg 1138581262.2 B/s, mdev 87871692.6 B/s ( 7.7%), confid. +/- 42193098.5 B/s ( 3.7%) all avg 1138581262.2 B/s, mdev 87871692.6 B/s ( 7.7%), confid. +/- 42193098.5 B/s ( 3.7%)
Each line shows result of one 30 second long test and average, mean deviation and 99% confidence interval half width through the iterations so far. While 17 iteration results are essentially the wire speed minus TCP overhead, iterations 1, 3 and 12 are more than 20% lower. As results of the same test on unpatched 5.12-rc7 are much more consistent (the lowest iteration result through the whole test was 1175939718.3 and the mean deviation only 276889.1 B/s), it doesn't seeem to be just a random fluctuation.
I'll try to find out what happens in these outstanding iterations.
Michal