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This series does not fix all the current known problems with reclaim but
it addresses one important swapping bug when there is background IO.
Changelog since V3
- Drop the slab shrink changes in light of Glaubers series and
discussions highlighted that there were a number of potential
problems with the patch. (mel)
- Rebased to 3.10-rc1
Changelog since V2
- Preserve ratio properly for proportional scanning (kamezawa)
Changelog since V1
- Rename ZONE_DIRTY to ZONE_TAIL_LRU_DIRTY (andi)
- Reformat comment in shrink_page_list (andi)
- Clarify some comments (dhillf)
- Rework how the proportional scanning is preserved
- Add PageReclaim check before kswapd starts writeback
- Reset sc.nr_reclaimed on every full zone scan
Kswapd and page reclaim behaviour has been screwy in one way or the
other for a long time. Very broadly speaking it worked in the far past
because machines were limited in memory so it did not have that many
pages to scan and it stalled congestion_wait() frequently to prevent it
going completely nuts. In recent times it has behaved very
unsatisfactorily with some of the problems compounded by the removal of
stall logic and the introduction of transparent hugepage support with
high-order reclaims.
There are many variations of bugs that are rooted in this area. One
example is reports of a large copy operations or backup causing the
machine to grind to a halt or applications pushed to swap. Sometimes in
low memory situations a large percentage of memory suddenly gets
reclaimed. In other cases an application starts and kswapd hits 100%
CPU usage for prolonged periods of time and so on. There is now talk of
introducing features like an extra free kbytes tunable to work around
aspects of the problem instead of trying to deal with it. It's
compounded by the problem that it can be very workload and machine
specific.
This series aims at addressing some of the worst of these problems
without attempting to fundmentally alter how page reclaim works.
Patches 1-2 limits the number of pages kswapd reclaims while still obeying
the anon/file proportion of the LRUs it should be scanning.
Patches 3-4 control how and when kswapd raises its scanning priority and
deletes the scanning restart logic which is tricky to follow.
Patch 5 notes that it is too easy for kswapd to reach priority 0 when
scanning and then reclaim the world. Down with that sort of thing.
Patch 6 notes that kswapd starts writeback based on scanning priority which
is not necessarily related to dirty pages. It will have kswapd
writeback pages if a number of unqueued dirty pages have been
recently encountered at the tail of the LRU.
Patch 7 notes that sometimes kswapd should stall waiting on IO to complete
to reduce LRU churn and the likelihood that it'll reclaim young
clean pages or push applications to swap. It will cause kswapd
to block on IO if it detects that pages being reclaimed under
writeback are recycling through the LRU before the IO completes.
Patchies 8-9 are cosmetic but balance_pgdat() is easier to follow after they
are applied.
This was tested using memcached+memcachetest while some background IO
was in progress as implemented by the parallel IO tests implement in MM
Tests.
memcachetest benchmarks how many operations/second memcached can service
and it is run multiple times. It starts with no background IO and then
re-runs the test with larger amounts of IO in the background to roughly
simulate a large copy in progress. The expectation is that the IO
should have little or no impact on memcachetest which is running
entirely in memory.
3.10.0-rc1 3.10.0-rc1
vanilla lessdisrupt-v4
Ops memcachetest-0M 22155.00 ( 0.00%) 22180.00 ( 0.11%)
Ops memcachetest-715M 22720.00 ( 0.00%) 22355.00 ( -1.61%)
Ops memcachetest-2385M 3939.00 ( 0.00%) 23450.00 (495.33%)
Ops memcachetest-4055M 3628.00 ( 0.00%) 24341.00 (570.92%)
Ops io-duration-0M 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%)
Ops io-duration-715M 12.00 ( 0.00%) 7.00 ( 41.67%)
Ops io-duration-2385M 118.00 ( 0.00%) 21.00 ( 82.20%)
Ops io-duration-4055M 162.00 ( 0.00%) 36.00 ( 77.78%)
Ops swaptotal-0M 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%)
Ops swaptotal-715M 140134.00 ( 0.00%) 18.00 ( 99.99%)
Ops swaptotal-2385M 392438.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%)
Ops swaptotal-4055M 449037.00 ( 0.00%) 27864.00 ( 93.79%)
Ops swapin-0M 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%)
Ops swapin-715M 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%)
Ops swapin-2385M 148031.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%)
Ops swapin-4055M 135109.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%)
Ops minorfaults-0M 1529984.00 ( 0.00%) 1530235.00 ( -0.02%)
Ops minorfaults-715M 1794168.00 ( 0.00%) 1613750.00 ( 10.06%)
Ops minorfaults-2385M 1739813.00 ( 0.00%) 1609396.00 ( 7.50%)
Ops minorfaults-4055M 1754460.00 ( 0.00%) 1614810.00 ( 7.96%)
Ops majorfaults-0M 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%)
Ops majorfaults-715M 185.00 ( 0.00%) 180.00 ( 2.70%)
Ops majorfaults-2385M 24472.00 ( 0.00%) 101.00 ( 99.59%)
Ops majorfaults-4055M 22302.00 ( 0.00%) 229.00 ( 98.97%)
Note how the vanilla kernels performance collapses when there is enough
IO taking place in the background. This drop in performance is part of
what users complain of when they start backups. Note how the swapin and
major fault figures indicate that processes were being pushed to swap
prematurely. With the series applied, there is no noticable performance
drop and while there is still some swap activity, it's tiny.
20 iterations of this test were run in total and averaged. Every 5
iterations, additional IO was generated in the background using dd to
measure how the workload was impacted. The 0M, 715M, 2385M and 4055M
subblock refer to the amount of IO going on in the background at each
iteration. So memcachetest-2385M is reporting how many
transactions/second memcachetest recorded on average over 5 iterations
while there was 2385M of IO going on in the ground. There are six
blocks of information reported here
memcachetest is the transactions/second reported by memcachetest. In
the vanilla kernel note that performance drops from around
22K/sec to just under 4K/second when there is 2385M of IO going
on in the background. This is one type of performance collapse
users complain about if a large cp or backup starts in the
background
io-duration refers to how long it takes for the background IO to
complete. It's showing that with the patched kernel that the IO
completes faster while not interfering with the memcache
workload
swaptotal is the total amount of swap traffic. With the patched kernel,
the total amount of swapping is much reduced although it is
still not zero.
swapin in this case is an indication as to whether we are swap trashing.
The closer the swapin/swapout ratio is to 1, the worse the
trashing is. Note with the patched kernel that there is no swapin
activity indicating that all the pages swapped were really inactive
unused pages.
minorfaults are just minor faults. An increased number of minor faults
can indicate that page reclaim is unmapping the pages but not
swapping them out before they are faulted back in. With the
patched kernel, there is only a small change in minor faults
majorfaults are just major faults in the target workload and a high
number can indicate that a workload is being prematurely
swapped. With the patched kernel, major faults are much reduced. As
there are no swapin's recorded so it's not being swapped. The likely
explanation is that that libraries or configuration files used by
the workload during startup get paged out by the background IO.
Overall with the series applied, there is no noticable performance drop
due to background IO and while there is still some swap activity, it's
tiny and the lack of swapins imply that the swapped pages were inactive
and unused.
3.10.0-rc1 3.10.0-rc1
vanilla lessdisrupt-v4
Page Ins
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| .. | ||
| backing-dev.c | ||
| balloon_compaction.c | ||
| bootmem.c | ||
| bounce.c | ||
| cleancache.c | ||
| compaction.c | ||
| debug-pagealloc.c | ||
| dmapool.c | ||
| fadvise.c | ||
| failslab.c | ||
| filemap_xip.c | ||
| filemap.c | ||
| fremap.c | ||
| frontswap.c | ||
| highmem.c | ||
| huge_memory.c | ||
| hugetlb_cgroup.c | ||
| hugetlb.c | ||
| hwpoison-inject.c | ||
| init-mm.c | ||
| internal.h | ||
| interval_tree.c | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| Kconfig.debug | ||
| kmemcheck.c | ||
| kmemleak-test.c | ||
| kmemleak.c | ||
| ksm.c | ||
| maccess.c | ||
| madvise.c | ||
| Makefile | ||
| memblock.c | ||
| memcontrol.c | ||
| memory_hotplug.c | ||
| memory-failure.c | ||
| memory.c | ||
| mempolicy.c | ||
| mempool.c | ||
| migrate.c | ||
| mincore.c | ||
| mlock.c | ||
| mm_init.c | ||
| mmap.c | ||
| mmu_context.c | ||
| mmu_notifier.c | ||
| mmzone.c | ||
| mprotect.c | ||
| mremap.c | ||
| msync.c | ||
| nobootmem.c | ||
| nommu.c | ||
| oom_kill.c | ||
| page_alloc.c | ||
| page_cgroup.c | ||
| page_io.c | ||
| page_isolation.c | ||
| page-writeback.c | ||
| pagewalk.c | ||
| percpu-km.c | ||
| percpu-vm.c | ||
| percpu.c | ||
| pgtable-generic.c | ||
| process_vm_access.c | ||
| quicklist.c | ||
| readahead.c | ||
| rmap.c | ||
| shmem.c | ||
| slab_common.c | ||
| slab.c | ||
| slab.h | ||
| slob.c | ||
| slub.c | ||
| sparse-vmemmap.c | ||
| sparse.c | ||
| swap_state.c | ||
| swap.c | ||
| swapfile.c | ||
| truncate.c | ||
| util.c | ||
| vmalloc.c | ||
| vmpressure.c | ||
| vmscan.c | ||
| vmstat.c | ||