Date:	Tue, 3 May 2011 13:17:20 +0900
From:	Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@...il.com>
To:	Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@...el.com>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Mel Gorman <mel@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Dave Young <hidave.darkstar@...il.com>,
	linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@...fujitsu.com>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>,
	Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux.com>,
	Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>,
	David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
	"Li, Shaohua" <shaohua.li@...el.com>,
	Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] mm: cut down __GFP_NORETRY page allocation failures

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 12:51 PM, Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@...el.com> wrote:
> Hi Minchan,
>
> On Tue, May 03, 2011 at 08:49:20AM +0800, Minchan Kim wrote:
>> Hi Wu, Sorry for slow response.
>> I guess you know why I am slow. :)
>
> Yeah, never mind :)
>
>> Unfortunately, my patch doesn't consider order-0 pages, as you mentioned below.
>> I read your mail which states it doesn't help although it considers
>> order-0 pages and drain.
>> Actually, I tried to look into that but in my poor system(core2duo, 2G
>> ram), nr_alloc_fail never happens. :(
>
> I'm running a 4-core 8-thread CPU with 3G ram.
>
> Did you run with this patch?
>
> [PATCH] mm: readahead page allocations are OK to fail
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/4/26/129
>

Of course.
I will try it in my better machine  i5 4 core 3G ram.

> It's very good at generating lots of __GFP_NORETRY order-0 page
> allocation requests.
>
>> I will try it in other desktop but I am not sure I can reproduce it.
>>
>> >
>> > root@fat /home/wfg# ./test-dd-sparse.sh
>> > start time: 246
>> > total time: 531
>> > nr_alloc_fail 14097
>> > allocstall 1578332
>> > LOC:     542698     538947     536986     567118     552114     539605     541201     537623   Local timer interrupts
>> > RES:       3368       1908       1474       1476       2809       1602       1500       1509   Rescheduling interrupts
>> > CAL:     223844     224198     224268     224436     223952     224056     223700     223743   Function call interrupts
>> > TLB:        381         27         22         19         96        404        111         67   TLB shootdowns
>> >
>> > root@fat /home/wfg# getdelays -dip `pidof dd`
>> > print delayacct stats ON
>> > printing IO accounting
>> > PID     5202
>> >
>> >
>> > CPU             count     real total  virtual total    delay total
>> >                 1132     3635447328     3627947550   276722091605
>> > IO              count    delay total  delay average
>> >                    2      187809974             62ms
>> > SWAP            count    delay total  delay average
>> >                    0              0              0ms
>> > RECLAIM         count    delay total  delay average
>> >                 1334    35304580824             26ms
>> > dd: read=278528, write=0, cancelled_write=0
>> >
>> > I guess your patch is mainly fixing the high order allocations while
>> > my workload is mainly order 0 readahead page allocations. There are
>> > 1000 forks, however the "start time: 246" seems to indicate that the
>> > order-1 reclaim latency is not improved.
>>
>> Maybe, 8K * 1000 isn't big footprint so I think reclaim doesn't happen.
>
> It's mainly a guess. In an earlier experiment of simply increasing
> nr_to_reclaim to high_wmark_pages() without any other constraints, it
> does manage to reduce start time to about 25 seconds.

If so, I guess the workload might depend on order-0 page, not stack allocation.

>
>> > I'll try modifying your patch and see how it works out. The obvious
>> > change is to apply it to the order-0 case. Hope this won't create much
>> > more isolated pages.
>> >
>> > Attached is your patch rebased to 2.6.39-rc3, after resolving some
>> > merge conflicts and fixing a trivial NULL pointer bug.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> I would like to see detail with it in my system if I can reproduce it.
>
> OK.
>
>> >> > no cond_resched():
>> >>
>> >> What's this?
>> >
>> > I tried a modified patch that also removes the cond_resched() call in
>> > __alloc_pages_direct_reclaim(), between try_to_free_pages() and
>> > get_page_from_freelist(). It seems not helping noticeably.
>> >
>> > It looks safe to remove that cond_resched() as we already have such
>> > calls in shrink_page_list().
>>
>> I tried similar thing but Andrew have a concern about it.
>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/3/24/138
>
> Yeah cond_resched() is at least not the root cause of our problems..
>
>> >> > +                     if (total_scanned > 2 * sc->nr_to_reclaim)
>> >> > +                             goto out;
>> >>
>> >> If there are lots of dirty pages in LRU?
>> >> If there are lots of unevictable pages in LRU?
>> >> If there are lots of mapped page in LRU but may_unmap = 0 cases?
>> >> I means it's rather risky early conclusion.
>> >
>> > That test means to avoid scanning too much on __GFP_NORETRY direct
>> > reclaims. My assumption for __GFP_NORETRY is, it should fail fast when
>> > the LRU pages seem hard to reclaim. And the problem in the 1000 dd
>> > case is, it's all easy to reclaim LRU pages but __GFP_NORETRY still
>> > fails from time to time, with lots of IPIs that may hurt large
>> > machines a lot.
>>
>> I don't have  enough time and a environment to test it.
>> So I can't make sure of it but my concern is a latency.
>> If you solve latency problem considering CPU scaling, I won't oppose it. :)
>
> OK, let's head for that direction :)

Anyway,  the problem about draining overhead with __GFP_NORETRY is
valuable, I think.
We should handle it

>
> Thanks,
> Fengguang
>

Thanks for the good experiments and numbers.


-- 
Kind regards,
Minchan Kim
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