* Jason Baron [off-list ref] wrote:
2) We are using the wakeup in this case to 'assign' work more
permanently to the thread. That is, in the case of a listen socket
we then add the connected socket to the woken up threads local set
of epoll events. So the load persists past the wake up. And in this
case, doing the round robin wakeups, simply allows us to access more
cpu bandwidth. (I'm also looking into potentially using cpu affinity
to do the wakeups as well as you suggested.)
So this is the part that I still don't understand.
What difference does LIFO versus FIFO wakeups make to CPU utilization:
a thread waiting for work is idle, no matter whether it ran most
recently or least recently.
Once an idle worker thread is woken it will compute its own work, for
whatever time it needs to, and won't be bothered by epoll again until
it finished its work and starts waiting again.
So regardless the wakeup order it's the same principal bandwidth
utilization, modulo caching artifacts [*] and modulo scheduling
artifacts [**]:
[*] Caching artifacts: in that sense Andrew's point stands: given
multiple equivalent choices it's more beneficial to pick a thread
that was most recently used (and is thus most cache-hot - i.e.
the current wakeup behavior), versus a thread that was least
recently used (and is thus the most cache-cold - i.e. the
round-robin wakeup you introduce).
[**] The hack patch I posted in my previous reply.
Thanks,
Ingo