The 25% default imbalance threshold for DIE and NUMA domain is large enough to generate significant unfairness between threads. A typical example is the case of 11 threads running on 2x4 CPUs. The imbalance of 20% between the 2 groups of 4 cores is just low enough to not trigger the load balance between the 2 groups. We will have always the same 6 threads on one group of 4 CPUs and the other 5 threads on the other group of CPUS. With a fair time sharing in each group, we ends up with +20% running time for the group of 5 threads.
Consider decreasing the imbalance threshold for overloaded case where we use the load to balance task and to ensure fair time sharing. Acked-by: Hillf Danton <[email protected]> Reviewed-by: Phil Auld <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Vincent Guittot <[email protected]> --- kernel/sched/topology.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/kernel/sched/topology.c b/kernel/sched/topology.c index 249bec7b0a4c..41df62884cea 100644 --- a/kernel/sched/topology.c +++ b/kernel/sched/topology.c @@ -1349,7 +1349,7 @@ sd_init(struct sched_domain_topology_level *tl, .min_interval = sd_weight, .max_interval = 2*sd_weight, .busy_factor = 32, - .imbalance_pct = 125, + .imbalance_pct = 117, .cache_nice_tries = 0, -- 2.17.1
