Optimize execution of processes by CPU core

[Pieter de Goeje]

Op 20-2-2019 om 19:19 schreef Eugene Grosbein:
> 21.02.2019 0:35, Farhan Khan via freebsd-hackers wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am trying to optimize the execution of a CPU-intensive workload where I am running multiple instances of a program.
>> The moment the program ends (expected behavior), the calling shell script verifies the results and if its good it reruns the program.
>> The machines I am running this on have 8 cores, but ps reports that some of the processes frequently run on the same CPU,
>> so I suspect I am not getting optimized performance.
> 
> System scheduler switches useland processed from one CPU core to another often enough
> so each CPU has even load and you cannot see that with naked. But you can easily verify
> if load is even or not checking sysctl kern.cp_times that shows five monotonically increasing
> counters per each CPU core. For example, in case of dual-core system:
> 
> $ sysctl kern.cp_times
> kern.cp_times: 14789486 132229 14016113 327160 949428773 14374865 139326 12056998 2941012 949179638
> $ sysctl kern.clockrate
> kern.clockrate: { hz = 1000, tick = 1000, profhz = 8126, stathz = 127 }
> 
> There are "stathz" ticks per second and for each core exactly one of five counters is incremented by one:
> user, nice, system, interrupt, idle. That is, each 5th counter is incremented
> if corresponding CPU core was idle during "the tick".
> 
> You can save output of sysctl kern.cp_times, run your test, stop it and save output again.
> Then compare difference of each 5th counter and they should be approximately equal.
> 
> You can even draw graphs if you periodically get samples of the sysctl, compute diffs with previous samples,
> divide diffs by period length in seconds and then divide again by "stathz" value.
> Multiply by 100 to get idle time of single CPU code in percents for the period.
> Repeat for each core.
> 
> I use net-mgmt/mrtg to draw such per-CPU graphs for my servers, it works just fine.

`top -P` does the same thing. It displays a 
user/nice/system/interrupt/idle line for each CPU.

- Pieter