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author | Wladimir J. van der Laan <laanwj@gmail.com> | 2018-04-07 19:24:47 +0200 |
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committer | Wladimir J. van der Laan <laanwj@gmail.com> | 2018-04-07 19:48:39 +0200 |
commit | becd8dd2ec514f766ee13ac0c01cc74429b966b7 (patch) | |
tree | 168d6adabe147493b4d017942c33e0f7db02ef25 /doc/developer-notes.md | |
parent | b2e5fe8b559b2f6561ee8f220e9141e401929f5e (diff) | |
parent | d54874d795a523d7cad5f4a9f4270145e56238f8 (diff) |
Merge #12618: Set SCHED_BATCH priority on the loadblk thread.
d54874d Set SCHED_BATCH priority on the loadblk thread. (Evan Klitzke)
Pull request description:
Today I came across #10271, and while reading the discussion #6358 was linked to. Linux systems have a `SCHED_BATCH` scheduler priority that is useful for threads like loadblk. You can find the full details at [sched(7)](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/sched.7.html), but I'll quote the relevant part of the man page below:
> ...this policy will cause the scheduler to always assume that the thread is
CPU-intensive. Consequently, the scheduler will apply a small scheduling penalty
with respect to wakeup behavior, so that this thread is mildly disfavored in
scheduling decisions.
>
> This policy is useful for workloads that are noninteractive, but do not want to
lower their nice value, and for workloads that want a deterministic scheduling
policy without interactivity causing extra preemptions (between the workload's
tasks).
I think this change is useful independently of #10271 and irrespective of whether that change is merged. Under normal operation the loadblk thread will just import `mempool.dat`. However, if Bitcoin is started with `-reindex` or `-reindex-chainstate` this thread will use a great deal of CPU while it rebuilds the chainstate database (and the block database in the case of `-reindex`). By setting `SCHED_BATCH` this thread is less likely to interfere with interactive tasks (e.g. the user's web browser, text editor, etc.).
I'm leaving the nice value unchanged (which also affects scheduling decisions) because I think that's better set by the user. Likewise I'm not using [ioprio_set(2)](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/ioprio_set.2.html) because it can cause the thread to become completely I/O starved (and knowledgeable users can use `ionice(1)` anyway).
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