Reducing latency on multicore pc's - Success!

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14 Dec 2012 01:36 #27696 by BigJohnT
I've just added a description of lut5 to the manual that might be a bit easier to read than the man page.

John

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14 Dec 2012 01:58 - 15 Dec 2012 00:31 #27697 by ArcEye
Hi

Regards multicore latency reduction - just done some quick tests and I am not able to reproduce the results.

I have a quad core machine in the house which brings in a steady 31179 max jitter on base thread as is, with stock 10.04 and 2.6.32-132-rtai kernel
Test with 4 instances of glxgears and opening Firefox and browsing.

With isolcpus=1,2,3 acpi_irq_nobalance noirqbalance on the boot line, irqbalance uninstalled, the irqbalance.conf script removed and your script inserted
max jitter 31218 with exact same loading for same time.

It runs like crap though on just 1 core.

I proved the other 3 cores had been isolated from mpstat -P ALL
Linux 2.6.32-122-rtai (INTEL-QUAD) 	13/12/12 	_i686_	(4 CPU)

17:36:35     CPU    %usr   %nice    %sys %iowait    %irq   %soft  %steal  %guest   %idle
17:36:35     all    0.16    0.00   14.27    1.30    0.05    0.02    0.00    0.00   84.20
17:36:35       0    0.65    0.00   58.86    5.38    0.19    0.10    0.00    0.00   34.83
17:36:35       1    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   99.99
17:36:35       2    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00  100.00
17:36:35       3    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00  100.00

and the IRQs have been moved to CPU 0 ( the low figures for 1,2,3 are constant throughout and presumably are those that occurred before the script was run)
           CPU0       CPU1       CPU2       CPU3       
  0:         50          0          0          0   IO-APIC-edge      timer
  1:          3          1          0          1   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
  8:          0          0          0          0   IO-APIC-edge      rtc0
  9:          0          0          0          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   acpi
 12:          2          2          1          1   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
 16:       1847         28         20         27   IO-APIC-fasteoi   uhci_hcd:usb3
 17:         19          0          0          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi 
 18:        266         20         20         11   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb5, uhci_hcd:usb8
 19:      16354        560        566        562   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ata_piix, ata_piix, uhci_hcd:usb7
 21:          0          0          0          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   uhci_hcd:usb4
 22:        245          1          0          2   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ohci1394, HDA Intel
 23:        111         27         29         29   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb2, uhci_hcd:usb6
 24:        481          0          0          0   PCI-MSI-edge      eth0
 25:     377712          1          0          1   PCI-MSI-edge      i915
NMI:          0          0          0          0   Non-maskable interrupts
LOC:     117573      93136       4044       1135   Local timer interrupts
SPU:          0          0          0          0   Spurious interrupts
PMI:          0          0          0          0   Performance monitoring interrupts
PND:          0          0          0          0   Performance pending work
RES:        551      19010        313        261   Rescheduling interrupts
CAL:       1110        439        437        435   Function call interrupts
TLB:          0          0          0          0   TLB shootdowns
TRM:          0          0          0          0   Thermal event interrupts
THR:          0          0          0          0   Threshold APIC interrupts
MCE:          0          0          0          0   Machine check exceptions
MCP:          2          2          2          2   Machine check polls
ERR:          3
MIS:          0

I have some test kernels I compiled a while back testing the effects of various kernel options, I think the best of these got the latency max jitter down to 15K on the same machine
(albeit that ran like crap too with 3 cores turned off)

Shame but those are the figures I got.
regards
Last edit: 15 Dec 2012 00:31 by ArcEye.

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15 Dec 2012 02:54 #27737 by awallin
I have now tried this without seeing much changes to the jitter histogram:
www.anderswallin.net/2012/12/real-time-tuning/

can you post the output of your watchirqs?

Any ideas why I am not seeing improvements?

Anders

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15 Dec 2012 18:01 - 15 Dec 2012 18:01 #27759 by ArcEye
I am wondering if the improvement on Spainmans machine actually came from these?

CPU
- disable Vanderpool Technology (cpu vitualization stuff for vm's)
- disable C1E support


I don't actually have them in my bios, although I have disabled similar functions regards power management, temperature control.

I think virtualisation is turned off in the kernel in the rtai .config anyway
Last edit: 15 Dec 2012 18:01 by ArcEye.

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15 Dec 2012 22:27 #27768 by Nebur
Okay - I never said that this would magically solve all high latency problems or something. That it does not change anything on your machine just means that the latency was not induced by the handling of an IRQ, right?
The low latency values I get are NOT because I changed something in the BIOS by accident like C1E or something!!! That's not me. Maybe I should elaborate a bit more on my testing and optimization process. I spend days with it running different old machines I had collecting dust and looking for the best one for linuxcnc.

Initial test to get a picture was with bios default settings which gave me a regular jitter of around 15000ns with peaks of 30000+ (no isolcpus). Next was changing all obvious values in the bios like c1e, SpeedStep ect. and suspicious values like hardware monitoring, temperature regulation of the cpu fan and others and setting isolcpus. After further tests, re-enabling ACPI 2.0 and fixing the sleep mode to S3 (instead of AUTO) resulted in <4000ns jitter nearly all the time with irregular peaks of up to 10000ns that happened during really heavy testing for the period of an hour. The next step was changing back "not so obvious" values in the bios to see which had an influence and which not (keeping all cpu settings but TM and disable bit off!), trying other vga-cards and more and more tests that revealed that reserving irqs in the pnp configuration changed the rate at which the 10000ns peaks happened. That lead me to the irq stuff. Observing the cpu usage showed that the second cpu irregularly jumped to 2% load although it was isolated. Watching the irq handling revealed that the second cpu was doing a lot of the handling, changed that with the attached scripts and the peak 10000ns values were gone! Changing the affinity mask to F still shows the peak ~10000ns values after running the machine under heavy load for a longer period of time.

So NO! This is not wishful thinking but a measure with reproducible effects on two core2duo machines!
Actually I think that it is quiet obvious that unloading the cpu on which the realtime stuff happens CAN have an impact. At least if the max jitter on a machine happens while handling an interrupt request and is not induced by something else.

Cheers,
Ruben

PS: In the meantime I installed the software opengl drivers in order to be able to start linuxcnc in a remote NX session. I will have to do dedicated testing to see what is going on but when using the remote session (normal "administration work", browsing and doing this and that) the jitter is even lower now at around 1800ns :huh:

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15 Dec 2012 22:31 - 15 Dec 2012 23:01 #27769 by Nebur
@Anders
I will make a screenshot and post it.
How do you create that histograms? Are the jitter values logged and I don't even know?

Thanks,
Ruben

Attachments:
Last edit: 15 Dec 2012 23:01 by Nebur. Reason: added attachment
The following user(s) said Thank You: tensor

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16 Dec 2012 04:41 #27780 by awallin

@Anders
I will make a screenshot and post it.
How do you create that histograms? Are the jitter values logged and I don't even know?


The histogram is a recent hack:
www.anderswallin.net/2012/12/latency-histogram/

creating the graph is a manual process for now:
- run the appropriate file with halcmd -f
- stop it with halcmd stop after a while (e.g. output file is 1M in size)
- plot with the python script

If there was an easy programmatic way to access the sampler/halsampler FIFO then it would be straightforward to plot a "live" latency-histogram. I may be inspired to look into this at some point.

AW

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16 Dec 2012 20:49 - 17 Dec 2012 19:30 #27784 by ArcEye

This is not wishful thinking but a measure with reproducible effects on two core2duo machines!


Don't forget to put the data about the machines into the latency database.
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Latency-Test

3600 max jitter is a pipe dream for most people, they will want to know precisely which boards you tested

regards
Last edit: 17 Dec 2012 19:30 by ArcEye.

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21 Jul 2013 21:12 #36865 by tensor
Thanks a lot, Spainman! Due to your tweaks I was able to reduce the latency significantly.

I started with a pretty constant max jitter of 40000.

First tweak was an overall reconfiguration of the bios according to Spainman's first post. In order to be able to change the Vanderpool Technology (to disable it) I had to start the PC into BIOS after a cold start. If I go into BIOS after a reboot, the option is not available.
Next I applied the interrupt reassignment with the very handy tools provided by Spainman.

After these changes, the longterm jitter was between 500 and 3500. However, starting glxgears caused peaks up to 70000. So I have replaced the NVidia video card by an ATI and now the jitter is always below 3500.

The final hardware setup is:
Mainboard: ASUS P5B deluxe
Processor: Core2Duo E6600 2x2.4GHz
RAM: 4 GB Corsair PC2-800 CL4
Video: Radeon X300, 128MB
HDD: 80GB Samsung IDE

-> 3500 max Jitter with 5 glxgears and FullHD video playback (which shows only a few frames every 10 seconds) mesured for 1 hour.

cheers,
stefan

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28 Aug 2013 06:17 #38173 by green751
Just thought I'd report some results here.

I bought and have installed a Gigabyte GA-E350N motherboard with 4 GB DDR1600 RAM. Storage is a 64 GB SSD. It boots an install from the latest live CD in about 20 seconds. For those that don't know, this is a mini itx low power PC with a dual core AMD cpu running at 1.6Ghz. The CPU includes an integrated Radeon GPU, although I am not using it at the moment because loading the radeon drivers seemed to greatly increase latency in previous testing.

I tried various configurations in the bios and grub to improve latency test scores. Oddly, it seemed to give better scores when I did *not* use the ISOLCPUs parameter, giving me stable 10000/4000 numbers with both CPUs enabled but all the other BIOS switches set as described here.

I then decided to try the scripts here and check latency, including running the ISOLCPUS parameter. So far it's running numbers of about 4000/1200 for latency running two copies of glxgears and browsing with a copy of firefox... a significant improvement if correct (this is, after all, a benchmark instead of real work).

Just another data point for you. I'll post later results after I run it in for 24 hours. I might try changing the base thread period to match the servo, and change the servo time to something like 125us, to simulate running an 8khz servo thread. If anyone can think of latency test settings to try to verify a servo thread that fast will really work, I'd appreciate it.

This computer is a replacement for my mill control PC, so I'll be installing a Mesa 5i20 and servo card for use, IE no software stepping... although the reason I want low latency is that I'd like to try doing software commutation on some brushless servos.

Erik

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