linux-kernel - Re: Kernel scanning/freeing to relieve cgroup memory pressure

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Date:	Thu, 17 Apr 2014 09:00:10 +0100
From:	Glyn Normington <gnormington@...ivotal.com>
To:	Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.cz>
CC:	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, cgroups@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Kernel scanning/freeing to relieve cgroup memory pressure

On 16/04/2014 10:11, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Tue 15-04-14 09:38:10, Glyn Normington wrote:
>> On 14/04/2014 21:50, Johannes Weiner wrote:
>>> On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 09:11:25AM +0100, Glyn Normington wrote:
>>>> Johannes/Michal
>>>>
>>>> What are your thoughts on this matter? Do you see this as a valid
>>>> requirement?
>>> As Tejun said, memory cgroups *do* respond to internal pressure and
>>> enter targetted reclaim before invoking the OOM killer.  So I'm not
>>> exactly sure what you are asking.
>> We are repeatedly seeing a situation where a memory cgroup with a given
>> memory limit results in an application process in the cgroup being killed
>> oom during application initialisation. One theory is that dirty file cache
>> pages are not being written to disk to reduce memory consumption before the
>> oom killer is invoked. Should memory cgroups' response to internal pressure
>> include writing dirty file cache pages to disk?
> This depends on the kernel version. OOM with a lot of dirty pages on
> memcg LRUs was a big problem. Now we are waiting for pages under
> writeback during reclaim which should prevent from such spurious OOMs.
> Which kernel versions are we talking about? The fix (or better said
> workaround) I am thinking about is e62e384e9da8 memcg: prevent OOM with
> too many dirty pages.
Thanks Michal - very helpful!

The kernel version, as reported by uname -r, is 3.2.0-23-generic.

According to https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/e62e384e9da8, the 
above workaround first went into kernel version 3.6, so we should plan 
to upgrade.
>
> I am still not sure I understand your setup and the problem. Could you
> describe your setup (what runs where under what limits), please?
I won't waste your time with the details of our setup unless the problem 
recurs with e62e384e9da8 in place.

Regards,
Glyn

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