linux-kernel - RE: [PATCH -v2 -mm] add extra free kbytes tunable

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Date:	Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:59:17 -0400
From:	Satoru Moriya <satoru.moriya@....com>
To:	David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>
CC:	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@...otime.net>,
	Satoru Moriya <smoriya@...hat.com>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-mm@...ck.org" <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	"lwoodman@...hat.com" <lwoodman@...hat.com>,
	Seiji Aguchi <saguchi@...hat.com>,
	"hughd@...gle.com" <hughd@...gle.com>,
	"hannes@...xchg.org" <hannes@...xchg.org>
Subject: RE: [PATCH -v2 -mm] add extra free kbytes tunable

emaOn 10/25/2011 05:50 PM, David Rientjes wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Oct 2011, Satoru Moriya wrote:
> 
>>>> We do.
>>>> Basically we need this kind of feature for almost all our latency
>>>> sensitive applications to avoid latency issue in memory allocation.
>>>
>>> These are all realtime?
>>
>> Do you mean that these are all realtime process?
>>
>> If so, answer is depending on the situation. In the some situations,
>> we can set these applications as rt-task. But the other situation,
>> e.g. using some middlewares, package softwares etc, we can't set them
>> as rt-task because they are not built for running as rt-task. And also
>> it is difficult to rebuilt them for working as rt-task because they
>> usually have huge code base.
>>
> 
> If this problem affects processes that aren't realtime, then your only 
> option is to increase /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes.  It's unreasonable to 
> believe that the VM should be able to reclaim in the background at the 
> same rate that an application is allocating huge amounts of memory without 
> allowing there to be a buffer.  Adding another tunable isn't going to 
> address that situation better than min_free_kbytes.


Even if allocating memory in user space causes latency issues, usually
allocation itself doesn't continue for a long time. Therefore if we
can keep enough free memory, we can avoid latency issue in this situation.

min_free_kbytes makes min wmark bigger too. It means that the amount of
memory user processes can use without penalty(direct reclaim) decrease
unnecessarily, this is what we'd like to avoid.


>> As I reported another mail, changing kswapd priority does not mitigate
>> even my simple testcase very much. Of course, reclaiming above the high
>> wmark may solve the issue on some workloads but if an application can
>> allocate memory more than high wmark - min wmark which is extended and
>> fast enough, latency issue will happen.
>> Unless this latency concern is fixed, customers doesn't use vanilla
>> kernel.
>>
> And you have yet to provide an expression that shows what a sane setting 
> for this tunable will be.  In fact, it seems like you're just doing trial 
> and error and finding where it works pretty well for a certain VM 
> implementation in a certain kernel.  That's simply not a maintainable 
> userspace interface!


Try and error is tuning itself. When we tune a system, we usually set
some knobs, run some benchmarks/tests/etc., evaluate results and
decide which is the best configuration.

Regards,
Satoru--
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