Fwd: Better default for ParallelGCThreads and ConcGCThreads by using number of physical cores and CPU mask.

[David Holmes]

Hi Jon,

On 23/11/2013 3:24 AM, Jon Masamitsu wrote:
> This is a contribution regarding the number of GC worker threads to
> use.  Part of the change queries /proc on linux to get the number of
> active cores on the platform.  The changes are in
>
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jmasa/8028554/webrev.00/hotspot/src/os_cpu/linux_x86/vm/os_linux_x86.cpp.frames.html
>
> Can someone familiar with this code take a look to see
> if it is reasonable and done in a way that is consistent
> with other /proc queries.

I can't comment on that specifically but I do have reservations about 
this proposed patch.

First we have a general problem that "active processor count" doesn't 
take into account the various resource management mechanisms that can 
limit the actual "processors" available to the VM when it is running. I 
would prefer to see that general problem solved. It also isn't clear to 
me that the sched_getaffinity usage will correctly reflect the use of 
tasksets/cpusets. (Note on solaris we try to handle some of these 
mechanisms eg pbind and psrsets but still don't handle resource pools.)

Second, this feeds into future work on NUMA-awareness that will likely 
need a more sophisticated set of API's.

Third I dislike that this is only really addressing linux-x86 and 
leaving the other platforms to default to cores==processors. That just 
causes unnecessary divergence in platform functionality.

This is too late for JDK 8 and I think we will be doing more complete 
work in this area during JDK 9 development.

Thanks,
David
-----

> Thanks.
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: 	Better default for ParallelGCThreads and ConcGCThreads by
> using number of physical cores and CPU mask.
> Date: 	Tue, 19 Nov 2013 15:35:22 -0800
> From: 	Jungwoo Ha <jwha at google.com>
> To: 	hotspot-gc-dev at openjdk.java.net
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I am sending this webrev for the review.
> (On behalf of Jon Masamitsu, it is upload here)
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jmasa/8028554/webrev.00/
> <http://cr.openjdk.java.net/%7Ejmasa/8028554/webrev.00/>
>
> The feature is a new heuristics to calculate the default
> ParallelGCThreads and ConGCThreads.
> In x86, hyperthreading is generally bad for GC because of the cache
> contention.
> Hence, using all the hyper-threaded cores will slow down the overall GC
> performance.
> Current hotspot reads the number of processors that the Linux reports,
> which treats all hyper-threaded cores equally.
> Second problem is that when cpu mask is set, not all the cores are
> available for the GC.
>
> The patch improves the heuristics by evaluating the actual available
> physical cores
> from the proc filesystem and the CPU mask, and use that as the basis for
> calculating the ParallelGCThreads and ConcGCThreads.
>
> The improvements of GC pause time is significant. We evaluated on
> Nehalem, Westmere, Sandybridge as well as several AMD processors. We
> also evaluated on various CPU mask configuration and single/dual socket
> configurations.
> In almost all cases, there were speed up in GC pause time by 10~50%.
>
> We primarily use CMS collector for the evaluation, but we also tested on
> other GCs as well.
> Please take a look and let me know if this patch can be accepted.
>
> Thanks,
> Jungwoo Ha
>
>
>