Date:	Fri, 13 May 2011 16:43:22 +0100
From:	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>
To:	Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux.com>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...senPartnership.com>,
	Colin King <colin.king@...onical.com>,
	Raghavendra D Prabhu <raghu.prabhu13@...il.com>,
	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, Chris Mason <chris.mason@...cle.com>,
	Pekka Enberg <penberg@...nel.org>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
	linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-ext4 <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] Reduce impact to overall system of SLUB using
 high-order allocations V2

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 10:21:46AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Fri, 13 May 2011, Mel Gorman wrote:
> 
> > SLUB using high orders is the trigger but not the root cause as SLUB
> > has been using high orders for a while. The following four patches
> > aim to fix the problems in reclaim while reducing the cost for SLUB
> > using those high orders.
> >
> > Patch 1 corrects logic introduced by commit [1741c877: mm:
> > 	kswapd: keep kswapd awake for high-order allocations until
> > 	a percentage of the node is balanced] to allow kswapd to
> > 	go to sleep when balanced for high orders.
> 
> The above looks good.
> 

Ok.

> > Patch 2 prevents kswapd waking up in response to SLUBs speculative
> > 	use of high orders.
> 
> Not sure if that is necessary since it seems that we triggered kswapd
> before? Why not continue to do it? Once kswapd has enough higher order
> pages kswapd should no longer be triggered right?
> 

Because kswapd waking up isn't cheap and we are reclaiming pages
just so SLUB may get high-order pages in the future. As it's for
PAGE_ORDER_COSTLY_ORDER, we are not entering lumpy reclaim and just
selecting a few random order-0 pages which may or may not help. There
is very little control of how many pages are getting freed if kswapd
is being woken frequently.

> > Patch 3 further reduces the cost by prevent SLUB entering direct
> > 	compaction or reclaim paths on the grounds that falling
> > 	back to order-0 should be cheaper.
> 
> Its cheaper for reclaim path true but more expensive in terms of SLUBs
> management costs of the data and it also increases the memory wasted.

Surely the reclaim cost exceeds SLUB management cost?

> A
> higher order means denser packing of objects less page management
> overhead. Fallback is not for free.

Neither is reclaiming a large bunch of pages. Worse, reclaiming
pages so SLUB gets a high-order means it's likely to be stealing
MIGRATE_MOVABLE blocks which eventually gives diminishing returns but
may not be noticeable for weeks. From a fragmentation perspective,
it's better if SLUB uses order-0 allocations when memory is low so
that SLUB pages continue to get packed into as few MIGRATE_UNMOVABLE
and MIGRATE_UNRECLAIMABLE blocks as possible.

>  Reasonable effort should be made to
> allocate the page order requested.
> 
> > Patch 4 notes that even when kswapd is failing to keep up with
> > 	allocation requests, it should still go to sleep when its
> > 	quota has expired to prevent it spinning.
> 
> Looks good too.
> 
> Overall, it looks like the compaction logic and the modifications to
> reclaim introduced recently with the intend to increase the amount of
> physically contiguous memory is not working as expected.
> 

The reclaim and kswapd damage was unintended and this is my fault
but reclaim/compaction still makes a lot more sense than lumpy
reclaim. Testing showed it disrupted the system a lot less and
allocated high-order pages faster with fewer pages reclaimed.

> SLUBs chance of getting higher order pages should be *increasing* as a
> result of these changes. The above looks like the chances are decreasing
> now.
> 

Patches 2 and 3 may mean that SLUB gets fewer high order pages when
memory is low and it's depending on high-order pages to be naturally
freed by SLUB as it recycles slabs of old objects. On the flip-side,
fewer pages will be reclaimed. I'd expect the latter option is
cheaper overall.

> This is a matter of future concern. The metadata management overhead
> in the kernel is continually increasing since memory sizes keep growing
> and we typically manage memory in 4k chunks. Through large allocation
> sizes we can reduce that management overhead but we can only do this if we
> have an effective way of defragmenting memory to get longer contiguous
> chunks that can be managed to a single page struct.
> 
> Please make sure that compaction and related measures really work properly.
> 

Local testing still shows them to be behaving as expected but then
again, I haven't reproduced the simple problem reported by Chris
and James despite using a few different laptops and two different
low-end servers.

> The patches suggest that the recent modifications are not improving the
> situation.
> 

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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