Why does load average on host increases as Allocation Stall happens?

[Per Liden]

On 11/14/19 7:58 PM, Sundara Mohan M wrote:
> Hi,
>     I have notices Load average on the host increases 5 - 10 times when
> Allocation Stall happens, trying to understand what causes load average to
> increase when this happens.

It's impossible to say with certainty without inspecting what's actually 
going on in the system. Florian's explanations are good. It could just 
be that your application workload is peaking, which in turn causes the 
allocation stalls.

> 
> Looking at the code
> zPageAllocator.cpp
> do {
> // Start asynchronous GC
> ZCollectedHeap::heap()->collect(GCCause::_z_allocation_stall);
> 
> // Wait for allocation to complete or fail
> page = request.wait();
> } while (page == gc_marker);
> 
> Seems request.wait() is internally doing a get call on ZFuture.
> 
> 1. Will this use this thread to spin on CPU or it is async (mean this
> thread will go to sleep and can be woken up when it is ready and other
> process can occupy this CPU)?

It's async.

/Per

> 2. Since load average increase matches exactly with allocation stall, is
> there any other operation (like Flushing page)  can cause this behavior?
> 
> Since i haven't enabled "gc,stats" tag in my logging i missed some
> information there. Will try to get that information when i can reproduce it.
> 
> 
> TIA,
> Sundar
>