• Eric Dumazet's avatar
    softirq: reduce latencies · c10d7367
    Eric Dumazet authored
    In various network workloads, __do_softirq() latencies can be up
    to 20 ms if HZ=1000, and 200 ms if HZ=100.
    
    This is because we iterate 10 times in the softirq dispatcher,
    and some actions can consume a lot of cycles.
    
    This patch changes the fallback to ksoftirqd condition to :
    
    - A time limit of 2 ms.
    - need_resched() being set on current task
    
    When one of this condition is met, we wakeup ksoftirqd for further
    softirq processing if we still have pending softirqs.
    
    Using need_resched() as the only condition can trigger RCU stalls,
    as we can keep BH disabled for too long.
    
    I ran several benchmarks and got no significant difference in
    throughput, but a very significant reduction of latencies (one order
    of magnitude) :
    
    In following bench, 200 antagonist "netperf -t TCP_RR" are started in
    background, using all available cpus.
    
    Then we start one "netperf -t TCP_RR", bound to the cpu handling the NIC
    IRQ (hard+soft)
    
    Before patch :
    
    # netperf -H 7.7.7.84 -t TCP_RR -T2,2 -- -k
    RT_LATENCY,MIN_LATENCY,MAX_LATENCY,P50_LATENCY,P90_LATENCY,P99_LATENCY,MEAN_LATENCY,STDDEV_LATENCY
    MIGRATED TCP REQUEST/RESPONSE TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET
    to 7.7.7.84 () port 0 AF_INET : first burst 0 : cpu bind
    RT_LATENCY=550110.424
    MIN_LATENCY=146858
    MAX_LATENCY=997109
    P50_LATENCY=305000
    P90_LATENCY=550000
    P99_LATENCY=710000
    MEAN_LATENCY=376989.12
    STDDEV_LATENCY=184046.92
    
    After patch :
    
    # netperf -H 7.7.7.84 -t TCP_RR -T2,2 -- -k
    RT_LATENCY,MIN_LATENCY,MAX_LATENCY,P50_LATENCY,P90_LATENCY,P99_LATENCY,MEAN_LATENCY,STDDEV_LATENCY
    MIGRATED TCP REQUEST/RESPONSE TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET
    to 7.7.7.84 () port 0 AF_INET : first burst 0 : cpu bind
    RT_LATENCY=40545.492
    MIN_LATENCY=9834
    MAX_LATENCY=78366
    P50_LATENCY=33583
    P90_LATENCY=59000
    P99_LATENCY=69000
    MEAN_LATENCY=38364.67
    STDDEV_LATENCY=12865.26
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
    Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    Cc: Tom Herbert <therbert@google.com>
    Cc: Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    c10d7367
softirq.c 20.8 KB