linux-kernel - Re: Swappiness vs. mmap() and interactive response

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Message-Id: <20090429130430.4B11.A69D9226@jp.fujitsu.com>
Date:	Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:51:07 +0900 (JST)
From:	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>
To:	Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>,
	Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@...el.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>,
	Elladan <elladan@...imo.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>, Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>
Cc:	kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com
Subject: Re: Swappiness vs. mmap() and interactive response

Hi

> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:09:16PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> > The semi-drop-behind is a great idea for the desktop - to put just
> > accessed pages to end of LRU. However I'm still afraid it vastly
> > changes the caching behavior and wont work well as expected in server
> > workloads - shall we verify this?
> > 
> > Back to this big-cp-hurts-responsibility issue. Background write
> > requests can easily pass the io scheduler's obstacles and fill up
> > the disk queue. Now every read request will have to wait 10+ writes
> > - leading to 10x slow down of major page faults.
> > 
> > I reach this conclusion based on recent CFQ code reviews. Will bring up
> > a queue depth limiting patch for more exercises..
> 
> We can muck with the I/O scheduler, but another thing to consider is
> whether the VM should be more aggressively throttling writes in this
> case; it sounds like the big cp in this case may be dirtying pages so
> aggressively that it's driving other (more useful) pages out of the
> page cache --- if the target disk is slower than the source disk (for
> example, backing up a SATA primary disk to a USB-attached backup disk)
> no amount of drop-behind is going to help the situation.
> 
> So that leaves three areas for exploration:
> 
> * Write-throttling
> * Drop-behind
> * background writes pushing aside foreground reads
> 
> Hmm, note that although the original bug reporter is running Ubuntu
> Jaunty, and hence 2.6.28, this problem is going to get *worse* with
> 2.6.30, since we have the ext3 data=ordered latency fixes which will
> write out the any journal activity, and worse, any synchornous commits
> (i.e., caused by fsync) will force out all of the dirty pages with
> WRITE_SYNC priority.  So with a heavy load, I suspect this is going to
> be more of a VM issue, and especially figuring out how to tune more
> aggressive write-throttling may be key here.

firstly, I'd like to report my reproduce test result.

test environment: no lvm, copy ext3 to ext3 (not mv), no change swappiness, 
                  CFQ is used, userland is Fedora10, mmotm(2.6.30-rc1 + mm patch),
                  CPU opteronx4, mem 4G

mouse move lag:               not happend
window move lag:              not happend
Mapped page decrease rapidly: not happend (I guess, these page stay in 
                                          active list on my system)
page fault large latency:     happend (latencytop display >200ms)


Then, I don't doubt vm replacement logic now.
but I need more investigate.
I plan to try following thing today and tommorow.

 - XFS
 - LVM
 - another io scheduler (thanks Ted, good view point)
 - Rik's new patch




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