Date:	Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:22:32 +0000
From:	Mel Gorman <mel@....ul.ie>
To:	Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.cz>,
	Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@...il.com>,
	linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: vmscan: Stop reclaim/compaction earlier due to
	insufficient progress if !__GFP_REPEAT

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:13:01AM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 09:50:49AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > The mean allocation times for THP allocations are also slightly reduced.
> > The maximum latency was slightly increased as predicted by the comments due
> > to reclaim/compaction breaking early. However, workloads care more about the
> > latency of lower-order allocations than THP so it's an acceptable trade-off.
> > Please consider merging for 2.6.38.
> 
> Full agreement. I'm currently dealing with latency issues (nothing
> major! but still not nice to see a reproducible regression, even if a
> small one only visible in the benchmark) with compaction and jumbo
> frames.

Out of curiousity, what are you measuring the latency of and how? I used
a combination of the function_graph ftrace analyser and the mm_page_alloc
tracepoint myself to avoid any additional patching and it was easier than
cobbling together something with kprobes. A perl script configures ftrace
and then parses the contents of trace_pipe - crude but does the job without
patching the kernel.

> This won't be enough to close them completely though because I
> didn't backport the change to vmscan.c and should_continue_reclaim (I
> backported all the other compaction improvements though, so this
> practically is the only missing bit).

How big are the discrepancies?

> I also suspected the e1000
> driver, that sets the NAPI latency to bulk_latency when it uses jumbo
> frames, so I wonder if it could be that with compaction we get more
> jumbo frames and the latency then gets reduced by the driver as side
> effect. Not sure yet.
> 

No idea.

> I like the above because it's less likely to give us compaction issues
> with jumbo frames when I add should_continue_reclaim on top. It seems
> anonymous memory allocation are orders of magnitude more long lived
> than jumbo frames could ever be, so at this point I'm not even
> entirely certain it's ok to enable compaction at all for jumbo
> frames. But I still like the above regardless of my current issue
> (just because of the young bits going nuked in one go the lumpy hammer
> way, even if it actually increases latency a bit for THP allocations).
> 

Can I have your ack on the patch then? Even if it doesn't resolve the
jumbo frame problems, it's in the right direction. Measuring how it
currently behaves and what direction should be taken may be something
still worth discussing at LSF/MM.

> One issue with compaction for jumbo frames, is the potentially very
> long loop, for the scan in isolated_migratepages.

Yes, the scanner is poor. The scanner for free pages is potentially just
as bad. I prototyped some designs that should have been faster but they
didn't make any significant difference so they got discarded.

> I added a counter to
> break the loop after 1024 pages scanned. This is extreme but this is a
> debug patch for now, I also did if (retval == bulk_latency) reval =
> low_latency in the e1000* drivers to see if it makes a difference. If
> any of the two will help I will track down how much each change
> contributes to lowering the network latency to pre-compaction
> levels. It may very well be only a compaction issue, or only a driver
> issue, I don't know yet (the latter less likely because this very
> compaction loop spikes at the top of oprofile output, but maybe that
> only affects throughput and the driver is to blame for the latency
> reduction... this is what I'm going to find pretty soon). Also this
> isolate_migratepages loop I think needs a cond_resched()

This surprises me. In my own tests at least, the compaction stuff was
way down in the profile and I wouldn't have expected scanning to take so
long as to require a cond_resched. I was depending on the cond_resched()
in migrate_pages() to yield the processor as necessary.

> (I didn't add
> that yet ;). 1024 pages scanned is too few, I just want to see how it
> behaves with an extremely permissive setting. I'll let you know when I
> come to some more reliable conclusion.
> 

Thanks.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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