On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Tejun Heo [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 02:19:29PM -0700, Paul Turner wrote:

quoted

quoted

Would it be possible for you to give realistic and concrete examples?
I'm not trying to play down the use cases but concrete examples are
usually helpful at putting things in perspective.

I don't think there's anything that's not realistic or concrete about
the example above.  The "suppose" parts were only for qualifying the
pool sizes for vcpu and non-vcpu threads above since discussion of
implementation using nice is dependent on knowing these counts.

Hmm... I was hoping for an actual configurations and usage scenarios.
Preferably something people can set up and play with.

This is much easier to set up and play with synthetically.  Just
create the 10 threads and 100 threads above then experiment with
configurations designed at guaranteeing the set of 100 threads
relatively uniform throughput regardless of how many are active.   I
don't think trying to run a VM stack adds anything except complexity
of reproduction here.

I take that the
CPU intensive helper threads are usually IO workers?  Is the scenario
where the VM is set up with a lot of IO devices and different ones may
consume large amount of CPU cycles at any given point?

Yes, generally speaking there are a few major classes of IO (flash,
disk, network) that a guest may invoke.  Each of these backends is
separate and chooses its own threading.