When running the SPECint_rate gcc on some very large boxes it was
noticed that the system was spending lots of time in
mpol_shared_policy_lookup(). The gamess benchmark can also show it and
is what I mostly used to chase down the issue since the setup for that I
found to be easier.
To be clear the binaries were on tmpfs because of disk I/O requirements.
We then used text replication to avoid icache misses and having all the
copies banging on the memory where the instruction code resides. This
results in us hitting a bottleneck in mpol_shared_policy_lookup() since
lookup is serialised by the shared_policy lock.
I have only reproduced this on very large (3k+ cores) boxes. The
problem starts showing up at just a few hundred ranks getting worse
until it threatens to livelock once it gets large enough. For example
on the gamess benchmark at 128 ranks this area consumes only ~1% of
time, at 512 ranks it consumes nearly 13%, and at 2k ranks it is over
90%.
To alleviate the contention in this area I converted the spinlock to an
rwlock. This allows a large number of lookups to happen simultaneously.
The results were quite good reducing this consumtion at max ranks to
around 2%.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tidy up code comments]
Signed-off-by: Nathan Zimmer <nzimmer@sgi.com>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Nadia Yvette Chambers <nyc@holomorphy.com>
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
4a8c7bb59a