linux-kernel - Re: Problem in Page Cache Replacement

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Message-ID: <50ACA209.9000101@gmail.com>
Date:	Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:42:33 +0800
From:	Jaegeuk Hanse <jaegeuk.hanse@...il.com>
To:	Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@...el.com>
CC:	metin d <metdos@...oo.com>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-mm@...ck.org" <linux-mm@...ck.org>
Subject: Re: Problem in Page Cache Replacement

On 11/21/2012 05:02 PM, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 04:34:40PM +0800, Jaegeuk Hanse wrote:
>> Cc Fengguang Wu.
>>
>> On 11/21/2012 04:13 PM, metin d wrote:
>>>>    Curious. Added linux-mm list to CC to catch more attention. If you run
>>>> echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches does it evict data-1 pages from memory?
>>> I'm guessing it'd evict the entries, but am wondering if we could run any more diagnostics before trying this.
>>>
>>> We regularly use a setup where we have two databases; one gets used frequently and the other one about once a month. It seems like the memory manager keeps unused pages in memory at the expense of frequently used database's performance.
>>> My understanding was that under memory pressure from heavily
>>> accessed pages, unused pages would eventually get evicted. Is there
>>> anything else we can try on this host to understand why this is
>>> happening?
> We may debug it this way.
>
> 1) run 'fadvise data-2 0 0 dontneed' to drop data-2 cached pages
>     (please double check via /proc/vmstat whether it does the expected work)
>
> 2) run 'page-types -r' with root, to view the page status for the
>     remaining pages of data-1
>
> The fadvise tool comes from Andrew Morton's ext3-tools. (source code attached)
> Please compile them with options "-Dlinux -I. -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE"
>
> page-types can be found in the kernel source tree tools/vm/page-types.c
>
> Sorry that sounds a bit twisted.. I do have a patch to directly dump
> page cache status of a user specified file, however it's not
> upstreamed yet.

Hi Fengguang,

Thanks for you detail steps, I think metin can have a try.

         flags    page-count       MB  symbolic-flags long-symbolic-flags
0x0000000000000000        607699     2373 
___________________________________
0x0000000100000000        343227     1340 
_______________________r___________    reserved

But I have some questions of the print of page-type:

Is 2373MB here mean total memory in used include page cache? I don't 
think so.
Which kind of pages will be marked reserved?
Which line of long-symbolic-flags is for page cache?

Regards,
Jaegeuk

>
> Thanks,
> Fengguang
>
>>> On Tue 20-11-12 09:42:42, metin d wrote:
>>>> I have two PostgreSQL databases named data-1 and data-2 that sit on the
>>>> same machine. Both databases keep 40 GB of data, and the total memory
>>>> available on the machine is 68GB.
>>>>
>>>> I started data-1 and data-2, and ran several queries to go over all their
>>>> data. Then, I shut down data-1 and kept issuing queries against data-2.
>>>> For some reason, the OS still holds on to large parts of data-1's pages
>>>> in its page cache, and reserves about 35 GB of RAM to data-2's files. As
>>>> a result, my queries on data-2 keep hitting disk.
>>>>
>>>> I'm checking page cache usage with fincore. When I run a table scan query
>>>> against data-2, I see that data-2's pages get evicted and put back into
>>>> the cache in a round-robin manner. Nothing happens to data-1's pages,
>>>> although they haven't been touched for days.
>>>>
>>>> Does anybody know why data-1's pages aren't evicted from the page cache?
>>>> I'm open to all kind of suggestions you think it might relate to problem.
>>>    Curious. Added linux-mm list to CC to catch more attention. If you run
>>> echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
>>>    does it evict data-1 pages from memory?
>>>
>>>> This is an EC2 m2.4xlarge instance on Amazon with 68 GB of RAM and no
>>>> swap space. The kernel version is:
>>>>
>>>> $ uname -r
>>>> 3.2.28-45.62.amzn1.x86_64
>>>> Edit:
>>>>
>>>> and it seems that I use one NUMA instance, if  you think that it can a problem.
>>>>
>>>> $ numactl --hardware
>>>> available: 1 nodes (0)
>>>> node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
>>>> node 0 size: 70007 MB
>>>> node 0 free: 360 MB
>>>> node distances:
>>>> node   0
>>>>     0:  10

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