Re: [gentoo-user] kde-apps/kde-l10n-16.04.3:5/5::gentoo conflicting with kde-apps/kdepim-l10n-15.12.3:5/5::gentoo

[james <garftd@verizon.net>]

On 08/10/2016 10:20 AM, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 10, 2016 10:13:29 AM james wrote:
>> On 08/10/2016 07:45 AM, Michael Mol wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, August 09, 2016 05:22:22 PM james wrote:
>
>>>>
>>>> I did a quick test with games-arcade/xgalaga. It's an old, quirky game
>>>> with sporadic lag variations. On a workstation with 32G ram and (8) 4GHz
>>>> 64bit cores, very lightly loaded, there is no reason for in game lag.
>>>> Your previous settings made it much better and quicker the vast majority
>>>> of the time; but not optimal (always responsive). Experiences tell me if
>>>> I can tweak a system so that that game stays responsive whilst the
>>>> application(s) mix is concurrently running then the  quick
>>>> test+parameter settings is reasonably well behaved. So thats becomes a
>>>> baseline for further automated tests and fine tuning for a system under
>>>> study.
>>>
>>> What kind of storage are you running on? What filesystem? If you're still
>>> hitting swap, are you using a swap file or a swap partition?
>>
>> The system I mostly referenced, rarely hits swap in days of uptime. It's
>> the keyboard latency, while playing the game, that I try to tune away,
>> while other codes are running. I try very hard to keep codes from
>> swapping out, cause ultimately I'm most interested in clusters that keep
>> everything running (in memory). AkA ultimate utilization of Apache-Spark
>> and other "in-memory" techniques.
>
> Gotcha. dirty_bytes and dirty_background_bytes won't apply to anything that
> doesn't call mmap() with a file backing or perform some other file I/O. If
> you're not doing those things, they should have little to no impact.

Background needed:: I'm one of those (idealists?) that deeply believes 
the holy grail of computing will soon emerge (nice pun huh). That is
that clusters, local clusters will run all workloads that multicore 
systems currently do. So a bunch of old crap can become a beautiful
computational system, whilst I sit back and sip exotic beverages and 
enjoy my day; video training to go to the gym and dominate the young 
studs on the court.... New hardware (aka new computers and cosmetic 
surgery) will do the rest.

So an incredible variety of memory, storage and file systems will 
ultimately need to be tested. I try to stay simple and focused (believe 
it  or not). Initially the thought is to run a primitive desktop, like
lxde or lxqt and use those under utilized resources as 
node-computational contributors, whist still remaining responsive at the 
keyboard (xgalaga is a quick and dirty test for this). So, you now have 
a wonderful cover story is the boss catches you noodling around with 
swords and sorcery to, you can tell'm you looking for subtle latency 
issues...... The game speeds up and slows down, with zero swapping, due 
to my I suspect mostly as VM issues and MM issues.
An 8 core never goes above 0.2 on the load and only rarely saturates one 
core, for a transient instance. Even if xgalaga is a single thread game, 
it does not explain this transient keyboard lag. I'm open to other forms 
of quick at-the-keyboard graphical tests as a quick and dirty 
measurement of overall system attentiveness to pending addtional 
input/workload demands. After that is happy, with a given set of running 
codes (test-vectors) I can get a very quick feedback of performance this 
way.

For deeper studies, I like trace-cmd/Ftrace/KernelShark, but those are 
like zabbix on utilization and analytical studies. I use xgalaga as a 
quick and dirty; but am surely open to new codes for that sort of quick 
and easy feedback.



> Ideal values for dirty_bytes and dirty_background_bytes will depend heavily on
> the nature of your underlying storage. Dozens of other things might be tweaked
> depending on what filesystem you're using. Which is why I was asking about
> those things.

A myriad of combinations exist. So picking some common combinations, 
will allow for others to test my work, when it is package up for sharing 
and testing. For me eventually automating a collection of 'test vectors' 
is what's important, not the first few test-vectors themselvs. Then the 
pathway forward for other collections of running processes can become 
yet another collection of 'test vectors'. No limit on these collectives. 
Eventually a customer will step forward and define the collective of 
'test vectors', so I do hope to work with/for one of the more 
progressive vendors, eventually, in these efforts. Certainly sharing the 
work, openly, is far more important to me. For now, I start with things 
I like, know and have some familiarity with; no magic on these choices.


>> Combined codes running simultaneously never hits the HD (no swappiness)
>> but still there is keyboard lag.
>
> Where are you measuring this lag? How much lag are we talking about?

Remember, I'm an EE and complex fluids computational kind of guy, so I 
have no problem drudging down the sparse or full matrix types of 
mentally inebriating adventuresome calculations, like computational 
chemistry. But, since this approach is not yet ready for those sorts of 
things, I keep things simple; for now. What I want, is an automated 
installation semantic, where folks can download images and run them on 
their small clusters) on a weekly basis and keep solving the same 
test-vector collectives over and over. Tweaks and ideas are in the newly 
released images, a group of gentoo-users test things out. But
an automated, quick and simple gentoo system, flies against what most 
folks believe in this community (dammit, I have to respect, so I work on 
my one scripts I have lifted from others)  {wink wink; nudge nudge}.
As you already know....


>> Not that it is actually affecting the
>> running codes to any appreciable degree, but it is a test I run so that
>> the cluster nodes will benefit from still being (low latency) quickly
>> attentive to interactions with the cluster master processes, regardless
>> of workloads on the nodes. Sure its  not totally accurate, but so far
>> this semantical approach, is pretty darn close. It's not part of this
>> conversation (on VM etc) but ultimately getting this right solves one of
>> the biggest problems for building any cluster; that is workload
>> invocation, shedding and management to optimize resource utilization,
>> regardless of the orchestration(s) used to manage the nodes. Swapping to
>> disc is verbotim, in my (ultimate) goals and target scenarios.
>>
>> No worries, you have given me enough info and ideas to move forward with
>> testing and tuning. I'm going to evolve these  into more precisely
>> controlled and monitored experiments, noting exact hardware differences;
>> that should complete the tuning of the Memory Management tasks, within
>> acceptable confine  . Then automate it for later checking on cluster
>> test runs with various hardware setups. Eventually these test will be
>> extended to a variety of  memory and storage hardware, once the
>> techniques are automated. No worries, I now have enough ideas and
>> details (thanks to you) to move forward.
>
> You've got me curious, now you're going to go run off and play with your
> thought problems and not share! Tease!

Dude, I share too much. If you had not gone of vacation (from 
gentoo-user) you'd know this. Since I am way too mentally handicapped to 
do all of this on my own, (and too old and wise to even try) I routinely 
seek guidance and help. I read quite a lot, to remind me of the mistakes 
from previous distributed parallel computational attempts; and that 
reading also saddens me a bit to see so many malformed cluster ideas. Oh 
well, failure is the most important lesson technical folks learn. Most 
often ideas just bounces off the wall right back at me, but I have 
learned to duck (most of the time). YOU and anyone else are most welcome 
to join my efforts; we all shall benefit from robust, local clusters, as 
masters of gentoo (or poezer of gentoo, just like me). <end philosophy>

So while we are at it, scripts or stage-4 images that can be rapidly 
booted up on a given small hardware cluster, are keen to my approach.
Memory management, is probably the most challenging aspect of building 
and robustly (efficient resource utilization) managing these clusters
or outsourced clusters (clouds in vendor speak).  I Use the same cluster 
setup, to test a myriad of different problem-solution sets on the 
identical hardware, but only change the software, including file 
systems: both DFS (cephfs/orangefs/openAFS/Beefs) and the local fs (xfs, 
ext4,) and well as hybrids like btrfs and special file systsems like 
bcache. On top of Openstack, Hadoop, Mesos, old Beowulf (with a fast DFS 
replacing NFS) and others.

Once domain specific problems are moved to a cluster and that solution
set is near-optimal, after robustly testing many codes, in a CI fashion
outlined above, it becomes a stage-4 canned solution for somebody to run
on their hardware. If they need more hardware resouces, within a 
specific interval, THEN outsource those resource needs to the Cloud 
Vendors. Expecting a cloud vendor to be a champion of your Domain 
Specific need, is a roadmap to chapter 11 or 13, for that corporation.
I suspect that once AWS and Google and MS and IBM learn what the NSA 
already knows, there will be a feeding frenzy on aquisitions of old 
technology companies. That's ultimately where the action is in clusters.

All of this 'smoke and mirrors' marketing centric on social networks is 
just that; smoke and mirros. Why do I say this? Simple; there already is 
enough processing power to solve those problems and needs with current 
Snoracle style solutions and the by the bloated on wall-street.

Now HPC, dude, that's the sweet edge of clustering. There are numerous
gargantuan issues in that sphere and a few, like DESHAW are getting RICH 
off of clusters. He, a single Stanford professor, mastered computational 
chemistry, and locked his expertise into ASIC chips.
Now he is conquering wallstreet. Domain Specific solutions are where the 
action is in clusters. It not that there's not money in the social 
networking spheres, those are locked up by the 'cost barrier to entry'
semantics. OK, I digress. But the important thing is local clusters, 
taht can be rapidly build and torn down and reconfigured, with a few 
simple keystrokes, are the future of clusters. A given small to mid 
sized company better learn how to build their own clusters, or they be 
in the welfare line, like several other billion folks are.


CoreOS and unikernels are really quite similar to my approach to 
clusters. A variety of Problem-solutions sets (aka test vectors) on 
identical hardware will light the pathway for Domain Specific cluster 
solutions. Mine will be a node cluster on amd64, for now.

So, I'm not sitting on some Stanford level of skills or knowledge base 
(think amplabs). I have decades of experiences in mostly unfulfilled 
promises for ubiquitous distributed processing, and only narrowly (very 
tightly) focuses success stories. Still, I am a believer in that the 
current crop of linux clusters will become an Utopia computation engine 
system that works from the most modest of needs like  mundane admin 
taskloads to the most demanding, time-sequence RT simulations of some of 
the grand challenges in computational dynamics and similar areas.

But, after several years of research, I mostly see kids trying the same 
crap we tried decades ago, with a new 'fancy-pants' programming 
language:: (hence the prediction that the current cluster kids are being 
manipulated by the VC firms and deep pocketed folks toward certain 
failure), whilst they pay off their debts. Same story, different overlord.


I am conflicted as to whether this is intentional or just a repeat of 
tards leading the blind and innocent off the cliff. That is most of the 
vendor centric cluster (marketers call these clouds), developing new 
codes are clueless. That said, surely those corps with large collections 
of existing software can migrate those critical codes to the cloud and 
only offer new versions of that software, with a (cloud centric) 
internet-needed license. Think Azure/MS, IBM etc etc. But that sort of 
position, will just allow competitors to eat away larger chunks of their 
market share. (But I really don't care about his part of the Cloud 
illusion. I'm a hard core hardware type who already knows that the 
future of clusters is mostly local, with local control. The cloud will 
become a secondary or tertiary market for cpu cycles and garbage 
collection (think social networking databases). Sure folks will put 
their websites on commercial clouds, but that is already just a natural 
evolution of Co-location of server and not some breakthrough is technology.




Down this pathway, the developments in the latest version of Clang, gcc, 
etc etc, and EEs making the resources of the GPU (including DDR5+) into 
a transparent computational resource for the routine compilers. rDMA is 
going to change (everything). Ram will finally not be the bottleneck, as 
FPGA and GPU resources can be configured, dynamically, as either highly 
specialize processors or highly specialized memory (look at CAMs, or 
Content Addressible Memory for a teaser). Router vendors have been 
making billions of dollars by adding CAMs to otherwise mundane 
processing systsems.

No more of those ancient (intel) parallel compilers and shit like 
that.... Plus and avalance of re-configurable memory types; mostly 
transparent to folks that use "emerge" for custom compiling. Then there 
is a hardened kernel. Few in the cluster world even know such things 
exist; more sadly why they are necessary and when they are necessary.
Keep puffing on that buntu hoka pipe, brah_heim.....


The flip side to this is that a lot of Vendors think that bloated linux 
operating systems, on top of non-tuned, non-stripped insecure linux 
kernels is going to be commercially viable. If you build your house on 
turds, when it starts to rain, there is a funky smell in the air, before 
it washes away.  Bloated buntu, debian or RHEL are turds and are not 
going to work compared to stripped, minimal linux systems. That's where 
Docker, just "bitch-slapped" their competition by moving to subsume 
Apline linux.....

Your postings and clarity on VM, has helped me focus, immensely. It is 
the current need in my work. Have I shared enough for you, today?

Any other questions, or ideas are most welcome, publically or privately.
I could be wrong about all of this, but, my fourth generational stab at
ubiquitous (distributed || parallel) processing experiences tell me I'm 
not wrong but have the right idea. I do lack current skills in so many 
areas, that my work is impeded.

Without the gentoo community, I could not posses such visions of 
future-present greatness; nor share it with others.




>>>> Perhaps Zabbix +TSdB can get me further down the pathway.  Time
>>>> sequenced and analyzed data is over kill for this (xgalaga) test, but
>>>> those coalesced test-vectors  will be most useful for me as I seek a
>>>> gentoo centric pathway for low latency clusters (on bare metal).
>>>
>>> If you're looking to avoid Zabbix interfering with your performance,
>>> you'll
>>> want the Zabbix server and web interface on a machine separate from the
>>> machines you're trying to optimize.
>>
>> agreed.
>>
>> Thanks Mike,
>> James
>
> np


Clusters will end up on people's wrist watches, in the trunks of their 
autos and at their homes:: So they control their computational needs and 
security, sooner  rather than later. I think the next president will 
mandate the opening of the OS to many vendors and open source for Cell 
phones, Apps and such. The current monopolies are excessively more 
powerful than the old 'robber barrons' and that fact is well recognized 
by lost of deeper thinkers. It's braned under globalization, but, it's 
demise is just under the horizon, imho.

True, ubiquitous clusters will be a result of hard work on compilers 
that take sequential problems and break them down into pieces and 
reassemble them into a form that can leverage parallel techniques. gcc 5 
and 6 and Clang are moving, rapidly in this direction. GPU vendors 
understand the importance of SIMD and MIMD processing for 'systolic' 
algorithms and such approaches to massive distributed processing. AMD 
(Radeon) understands that this power can most effectively be used, if it 
is cheap and open sourced. Nvidia, no so quick to follow (or lead) down 
this open source path, imho. Intel purchasing a FPGA company and 
licensing GPU technologies from many others, tells me the hardware 
vendors are preparing for a revolution. A direct sales channel to the 
commoners will be their greatest path to rediculous profitability. Why? 
Simple, the smaller the core (competitive team) that exists, the more 
excessive processing resources that will be purchased and purchased 
closer to the retail price.

When hardware vendors partner with a few sofware companies, the margins 
on hardware get squeezed. Besides the hackers of the work, are finding 
any critical barriers to codes and publishing it so all have fair access 
to the latest codes (one way or another). The NSA and such entities are 
not going to stop this, because all of this software espionage, 
justifies governments taxing the snot out of citizens to fight those 
evil hackers. It's a far superior business model for DoD
types like intel and google, than the cold ware ever though about being.
The average tax-payer is too stupid to realize social network, with an 
Onior approach, is just feeding data-sets via google, linkedin, facebook
etc, directly to the NSA and other Nation State actors. WE get jobs
and pay taxes. They set the rules and manage the data.

Problem is, eventually, the commoners will have sufficent clusters, 
solar panels water wells or sources and  green house and tell da_main
to stick his taxes on imports. Fine that works, then everybody gets
a 3D printer and we, the commoners are self sufficient.

The simple fact is that is a great business model for EVERYONE, 
including the elites, so what are we waiting on?  A stupid old man like 
me? Naw, not at Gentoo, buntu, sure, RHEL definately, but not gentoo, 
brah. WE are the solution to everything!

</>

James