sched/fair: Fix low cpu usage with high throttling by removing expiration of cpu-local slices
It has been observed, that highly-threaded, non-cpu-bound applications running under cpu.cfs_quota_us constraints can hit a high percentage of periods throttled while simultaneously not consuming the allocated amount of quota. This use case is typical of user-interactive non-cpu bound applications, such as those running in kubernetes or mesos when run on multiple cpu cores. This has been root caused to cpu-local run queue being allocated per cpu bandwidth slices, and then not fully using that slice within the period. At which point the slice and quota expires. This expiration of unused slice results in applications not being able to utilize the quota for which they are allocated. The non-expiration of per-cpu slices was recently fixed by 'commit 512ac999 ("sched/fair: Fix bandwidth timer clock drift condition")'. Prior to that it appears that this had been broken since at least 'commit 51f2176d ("sched/fair: Fix unlocked reads of some cfs_b->quota/period")' which was introduced in v3.16-rc1 in 2014. That added the following conditional which resulted in slices never being expired. if (cfs_rq->runtime_expires != cfs_b->runtime_expires) { /* extend local deadline, drift is bounded above by 2 ticks */ cfs_rq->runtime_expires += TICK_NSEC; Because this was broken for nearly 5 years, and has recently been fixed and is now being noticed by many users running kubernetes (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/67577) it is my opinion that the mechanisms around expiring runtime should be removed altogether. This allows quota already allocated to per-cpu run-queues to live longer than the period boundary. This allows threads on runqueues that do not use much CPU to continue to use their remaining slice over a longer period of time than cpu.cfs_period_us. However, this helps prevent the above condition of hitting throttling while also not fully utilizing your cpu quota. This theoretically allows a machine to use slightly more than its allotted quota in some periods. This overflow would be bounded by the remaining quota left on each per-cpu runqueueu. This is typically no more than min_cfs_rq_runtime=1ms per cpu. For CPU bound tasks this will change nothing, as they should theoretically fully utilize all of their quota in each period. For user-interactive tasks as described above this provides a much better user/application experience as their cpu utilization will more closely match the amount they requested when they hit throttling. This means that cpu limits no longer strictly apply per period for non-cpu bound applications, but that they are still accurate over longer timeframes. This greatly improves performance of high-thread-count, non-cpu bound applications with low cfs_quota_us allocation on high-core-count machines. In the case of an artificial testcase (10ms/100ms of quota on 80 CPU machine), this commit resulted in almost 30x performance improvement, while still maintaining correct cpu quota restrictions. That testcase is available at https://github.com/indeedeng/fibtest . Fixes: 512ac999 ("sched/fair: Fix bandwidth timer clock drift condition") Signed-off-by: Dave Chiluk <chiluk+linux@indeed.com> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Reviewed-by: Phil Auld <pauld@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Ben Segall <bsegall@google.com> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com> Cc: John Hammond <jhammond@indeed.com> Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Cc: Kyle Anderson <kwa@yelp.com> Cc: Gabriel Munos <gmunoz@netflix.com> Cc: Peter Oskolkov <posk@posk.io> Cc: Cong Wang <xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com> Cc: Brendan Gregg <bgregg@netflix.com> Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/1563900266-19734-2-git-send-email-chiluk+linux@indeed.com
Please register or sign in to comment