In D15985#339583, @gallatin wrote:

I ran this on a Netflix 100g box. I observed no measurable difference in CPU time. So I think this patch is "neutral" for the perspective of our (mostly kernel) workload.

Also, a thread that has an average runtime between wakeups that is much less than the batch time slice needs to be able to interrupt a totally CPU-bound thread.

Another potential advantage of the scheme that I suggested is that I think it should reduce thrashing in certain circumstances. For instance, if there are a bunch of cksum-like threads running in parallel, only a limited number of them will be pulled out of the time share queue. Once sufficient threads have pulled off that queue to fully occupy the CPU, no more will be started until some of the first bunch reach the end of their time slices. The current implementation will rapidly churn through the contents of the time share queue as each thread goes to sleep and triggers the next thread in the queue to be started.

An interesting approach might be to put non-interactive threads on the real-time queue if they are preempted or sleep/wakeup before they have consumed their entire time slice. This shouldn't change anything for a totally CPU-bound thread unless it gets preempted. For the cksum example, the thread would temporarily be treated more like a low-priority interactive thread until in manages to use up its time slice and gets put back on the timeshare queue where it will have to sit and wait for its turn to run again. In a situation like this, there could be more than one thread removed from the time share queue.

In D16301#345971, @markj wrote:

In D16301#345968, @alc wrote:

How should I proceed?

How about asking @truckman to try a poudriere run on Ryzen with this change? He had reported that some port build failures stopped occurring with r329254.

This patch works as well as the manual sysctl tuning experiment that I previously tried.

I don't remember seeing any finalizer related crashes. The failures were mostly malloc-related and looked like they could be caused by arena corruption. I can try to dig up the logs later. I don't recall seeing any build failures on my FX CPU, but lang/go would almost always fail to build on Ryzen.

As noted in my email comment, this patch appears to have resolved a number of randomish-looking ports build failures on my Ryzen machine, in particular lang/go and anything related to lang/guile.

The changes in this update are: