Linux Community · The linux execution flow in one diagram (with sequence chart)

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LIr/linux·posted by nikic·6 hours agoTooling

The linux execution flow in one diagram (with sequence chart)

Some background first. Our setup is linux plus three downstream services, seven figures of daily requests, peaking around nine in the evening.

The first thing was to collapse the variables. We were changing config and upgrading the version at the same time, and afterwards nobody could say which change caused what. We rolled back to moving one variable at a time, re-ran three times, and only then did the curve settle. Tedious, but not skippable.

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13 comments

13 comments

M
Kkite·28 minutes ago

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

215
Lli_ming·12 minutes ago

We have run this in production for two years without hitting it. That said, we never reached this scale, so our experience is not really evidence here.

175
Bbob_chen·28 minutes agoedited

I just read the linux source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

1
Zzhou_yi·1 hour ago

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

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Bbob_chen·3 minutes ago

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

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Nnikic·3 minutes ago

One counter-example: below linux 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

68
Kkernel_panic·12 minutes ago

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

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Nnikic·1 hour ago

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

18
Bbob_chen·28 minutes ago

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

11
Wwinter·12 minutes agoedited

This is not a linux problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

80
Sslow_query·12 minutes ago

Can you give a minimal reproduction? I ran it locally for ten minutes and could not reproduce on macOS with the latest version.

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Kkernel_panic·yesterdayedited

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

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Zzhou_yiMod·yesterday

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

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