BUG/MINOR: task: prevent schedulable tasks from starving under high I/O activity
With both I/O and tasks in the same tasklet list, we now have a very
smooth and responsive scheduler, providing a good fairness between I/O
activities. With the lower layers relying on tasklet a lot (I/O wakeup,
subscribe, etc), there may often be a large number of totally autonomous
tasklets doing their business such as forwarding data between two muxes.
But the task scheduler historically refrained from picking tasks from the
priority-ordered run queue to put them into the tasklet list until this
later had less than max_runqueue_depth entries. This was to make sure that
low-latency, high-priority tasks would have an opportunity to be dequeued
before others even if they arrive late. But the counter used for this is
still the tasklet list size, which contains countless I/O events. This
causes an unfairness between unbounded I/Os and bounded tasks, resulting
for example in the CLI responding slower when forwarding 40 Gbps of HTTP
traffic spread over a thousand of connections.
A good solution consists in sticking to the initial intent of
max_runqueue_depth which is to limit the number of tasks in the list
(to maintain fairness between them) and not to limit the number of these
tasks among tasklets. It just turns out that the task_list_size initially
was this task counter and changed over time to be a tasklet list size.
Let's simply refrain from updating it for pure tasklets so that it takes
back its original role of counting real tasks as its name implies. With
this change the CLI becomes instantly responsive under load again.
This patch may possibly be backported to 1.9 though it requires some
careful checks.
1 file changed