Date:	Mon, 2 Mar 2009 12:16:33 +0000
From:	Mel Gorman <mel@....ul.ie>
To:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>
Cc:	Lin Ming <ming.m.lin@...el.com>,
	Pekka Enberg <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
	Linux Memory Management List <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>,
	Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Zhang Yanmin <yanmin_zhang@...ux.intel.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 00/19] Cleanup and optimise the page allocator V2

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 12:39:36PM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 11:21:22AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > (Added Ingo as a second scheduler guy as there are queries on tg_shares_up)
> > 
> > On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 04:44:43PM +0800, Lin Ming wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 19:22 +0800, Mel Gorman wrote: 
> > > > In that case, Lin, could I also get the profiles for UDP-U-4K please so I
> > > > can see how time is being spent and why it might have gotten worse?
> > > 
> > > I have done the profiling (oltp and UDP-U-4K) with and without your v2
> > > patches applied to 2.6.29-rc6.
> > > I also enabled CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO so you can translate address to source
> > > line with addr2line.
> > > 
> > > You can download the oprofile data and vmlinux from below link,
> > > http://www.filefactory.com/file/af2330b/
> > > 
> > 
> > Perfect, thanks a lot for profiling this. It is a big help in figuring out
> > how the allocator is actually being used for your workloads.
> > 
> > The OLTP results had the following things to say about the page allocator.
> 
> Is this OLTP, or UDP-U-4K?
> 

OLTP. I didn't do a comparison for UDP due to uncertainity of what I was
looking at other than to note that high-order allocations may be a
bigger deal there.

>  
> > Samples in the free path
> > 	vanilla:	6207
> > 	mg-v2:		4911
> > Samples in the allocation path
> > 	vanilla		19948
> > 	mg-v2:		14238
> > 
> > This is based on glancing at the following graphs and not counting the VM
> > counters as it can't be determined which samples are due to the allocator
> > and which are due to the rest of the VM accounting.
> > 
> > http://www.csn.ul.ie/~mel/postings/lin-20090228/free_pages-vanilla-oltp.png
> > http://www.csn.ul.ie/~mel/postings/lin-20090228/free_pages-mgv2-oltp.png
> > 
> > So the path costs are reduced in both cases. Whatever caused the regression
> > there doesn't appear to be in time spent in the allocator but due to
> > something else I haven't imagined yet. Other oddness
> > 
> > o According to the profile, something like 45% of time is spent entering
> >   the __alloc_pages_nodemask() function. Function entry costs but not
> >   that much. Another significant part appears to be in checking a simple
> >   mask. That doesn't make much sense to me so I don't know what to do with
> >   that information yet.
> > 
> > o In get_page_from_freelist(), 9% of the time is spent deleting a page
> >   from the freelist.
> > 
> > Neither of these make sense, we're not spending time where I would expect
> > to at all. One of two things are happening. Something like cache misses or
> > bounces are dominating for some reason that is specific to this machine. Cache
> > misses are one possibility that I'll check out. The other is that the sample
> > rate is too low and the profile counts are hence misleading.
> > 
> > Question 1: Would it be possible to increase the sample rate and track cache
> > misses as well please?
> 
> If the events are constantly biased, I don't think sample rate will
> help. I don't know how the internals of profiling counters work exactly,
> but you would expect yes cache misses, and stalls from any number of
> different resources could put results in funny places.
> 

Ok, if it's stalls that are the real factor then yes, increasing the
sample rate might not help. However, the same rates for instructions
were so low, I thought it might be a combination of both low sample
count and stalls happening at particular places. A profile of cache
misses will still be useful as it'll say in general if there is a marked
increase overall or not.

> Intel's OLTP workload is very sensitive to cacheline footprint of the
> kernel, and if you touch some extra cachelines at point A, it can just
> result in profile hits getting distributed all over the place. Profiling
> cache misses might help, but probably see a similar phenomenon.
> 

Interesting, this might put a hole in replacing the gfp_zone() with a
version that uses an additional (or maybe two depending on alignment)
cacheline.

> I can't remember, does your latest patchset include any patches that change
> the possible order in which pages move around? Or is it just made up of
> straight-line performance improvement of existing implementation?
> 

It shouldn't affect order. I did a test a while ago to make sure pages
were still coming back in contiguous order as some IO cards depend on this
behaviour for performance. The intention for the first pass is a straight-line
performance improvement.

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab
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