tree c847e25dc4377d0f206bd48c30fb3b96a572646a
parent 139d025cda1da5484e7287b35c019fe1dcf9b650
author Dave Chiluk <chiluk+linux@indeed.com> 1563900266 -0500
committer Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> 1565248170 +0200

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 512ac999d275 ("sched/fair: Fix bandwidth timer clock drift
condition")'. Prior to that it appears that this had been broken since
at least 'commit 51f2176d74ac ("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: 512ac999d275 ("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