linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 32/34] mm: vmstat: account per-zone stalls and pages skipped during reclaim

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Date:	Tue, 12 Jul 2016 15:06:06 -0400
From:	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
To:	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>, Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>,
	Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
	Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>,
	Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@....com>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 32/34] mm: vmstat: account per-zone stalls and pages
 skipped during reclaim

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 10:35:08AM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> The vmstat allocstall was fairly useful in the general sense but
> node-based LRUs change that.  It's important to know if a stall was for an
> address-limited allocation request as this will require skipping pages
> from other zones.  This patch adds pgstall_* counters to replace
> allocstall.  The sum of the counters will equal the old allocstall so it
> can be trivially recalculated.  A high number of address-limited
> allocation requests may result in a lot of useless LRU scanning for
> suitable pages.
> 
> As address-limited allocations require pages to be skipped, it's important
> to know how much useless LRU scanning took place so this patch adds
> pgskip* counters.  This yields the following model
> 
> 1. The number of address-space limited stalls can be accounted for (pgstall)
> 2. The amount of useless work required to reclaim the data is accounted (pgskip)
> 3. The total number of scans is available from pgscan_kswapd and pgscan_direct
>    so from that the ratio of useful to useless scans can be calculated.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>
> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>

These statistics should be quite helpful, so:

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>

But I have one nitpick:

> @@ -23,6 +23,8 @@
>  
>  enum vm_event_item { PGPGIN, PGPGOUT, PSWPIN, PSWPOUT,
>  		FOR_ALL_ZONES(PGALLOC),
> +		FOR_ALL_ZONES(PGSTALL),
> +		FOR_ALL_ZONES(PGSCAN_SKIP),
>  		PGFREE, PGACTIVATE, PGDEACTIVATE,
>  		PGFAULT, PGMAJFAULT,
>  		PGLAZYFREED,

The PG prefix seems to stand for page, and all stat names that contain
it represent some per-page event. PGSTALL is not a page event, though.
Would you mind sticking with allocstall? allocstall_dma32 etc.