Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] sbitmap: NUMA node spreading

[Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>]

On 5/10/22 7:44 AM, John Garry wrote:
> On 10/05/2022 13:50, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>> fio config:
>>> bs=4096, iodepth=128, numjobs=10, cpus_allowed_policy=split, rw=read,
>>> ioscheduler=none
>>>
>>> Before:
>>> 7130K
>>>
>>> After:
>>> 7630K
>>>
>>> So a +7% IOPS gain.
> 
> Thanks for having a look.
> 
>> What does the comparison run on a non-NUMA non-shared queue look like?
>> Because I bet it'd be slower.
> 
> I could test more to get a solid result for that.
> 
>>
>> To be honest, I don't like this approach at all. It makes the normal
>> case quite a bit slower by having an extra layer of indirection for the
>> word, that's quite a bit of extra cost.
> 
> Yes, there is the extra load. I would hope that there would be a low
> cost, but I agree that we still want to avoid it. So prob no point in
> testing this more.

I don't think that's low cost at all. It's the very hot path, and you're
now not only doing an extra load, it's a dependent load - you need to
load both to make any progress. On top of that, it's not like it's two
loads from the same cacheline or even page. The most important thing for
performance these days is having good cache utilization, the patch as it
stands very much makes that a lot worse.

Besides, for any kind of performance work like that, it's customary to
showcase both the situation that is supposedly fixed or improved with
the change, but also to test that it didn't regress the existing
common/fast case.

>> It doesn't seem like a good
>> approach for the issue, as it pessimizes the normal fast case.
>>
>> Spreading the memory out does probably make sense, but we need to retain
>> the fast normal case. Making sbitmap support both, selected at init
>> time, would be far more likely to be acceptable imho.
> 
> I wanted to keep the code changes minimal for an initial RFC to test
> the water.
>
> My original approach did not introduce the extra load for normal path
> and had some init time selection for a normal word map vs numa word
> map, but the code grew and became somewhat unmanageable. I'll revisit
> it to see how to improve that.

Probably just needs some clean refactoring first, so that the actual
change can be pretty small.

-- 
Jens Axboe