Date:   Thu, 1 Oct 2020 10:31:49 -0400
From:   Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
To:     Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@...gle.com>
Cc:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>, Roman Gushchin <guro@...com>,
        Yang Shi <yang.shi@...ux.alibaba.com>,
        Greg Thelen <gthelen@...gle.com>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
        Michal Koutný <mkoutny@...e.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Linux MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        Cgroups <cgroups@...r.kernel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] memcg: introduce per-memcg reclaim interface

On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 08:45:17AM -0700, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 2:55 PM Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 05:04:44PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > On Mon 28-09-20 17:02:16, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > > My take is that a proactive reclaim feature, whose goal is never to
> > > > thrash or punish but to keep the LRUs warm and the workingset trimmed,
> > > > would ideally have:
> > > >
> > > > - a pressure or size target specified by userspace but with
> > > >   enforcement driven inside the kernel from the allocation path
> > > >
> > > > - the enforcement work NOT be done synchronously by the workload
> > > >   (something I'd argue we want for *all* memory limits)
> > > >
> > > > - the enforcement work ACCOUNTED to the cgroup, though, since it's the
> > > >   cgroup's memory allocations causing the work (again something I'd
> > > >   argue we want in general)
> > > >
> > > > - a delegatable knob that is independent of setting the maximum size
> > > >   of a container, as that expresses a different type of policy
> > > >
> > > > - if size target, self-limiting (ha) enforcement on a pressure
> > > >   threshold or stop enforcement when the userspace component dies
> > > >
> > > > Thoughts?
> > >
> > > Agreed with above points. What do you think about
> > > http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200922190859.GH12990@dhcp22.suse.cz.
> >
> > I definitely agree with what you wrote in this email for background
> > reclaim. Indeed, your description sounds like what I proposed in
> > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200219181219.54356-1-hannes@cmpxchg.org/
> > - what's missing from that patch is proper work attribution.
> >
> > > I assume that you do not want to override memory.high to implement
> > > this because that tends to be tricky from the configuration POV as
> > > you mentioned above. But a new limit (memory.middle for a lack of a
> > > better name) to define the background reclaim sounds like a good fit
> > > with above points.
> >
> > I can see that with a new memory.middle you could kind of sort of do
> > both - background reclaim and proactive reclaim.
> >
> > That said, I do see advantages in keeping them separate:
> >
> > 1. Background reclaim is essentially an allocation optimization that
> >    we may want to provide per default, just like kswapd.
> >
> >    Kswapd is tweakable of course, but I think actually few users do,
> >    and it works pretty well out of the box. It would be nice to
> >    provide the same thing on a per-cgroup basis per default and not
> >    ask users to make decisions that we are generally better at making.
> >
> > 2. Proactive reclaim may actually be better configured through a
> >    pressure threshold rather than a size target.
> >
> >    As per above, the goal is not to be punitive or containing. The
> >    goal is to keep the LRUs warm and move the colder pages to disk.
> >
> >    But how aggressively do you run reclaim for this purpose? What
> >    target value should a user write to such a memory.middle file?
> >
> >    For one, it depends on the job. A batch job, or a less important
> >    background job, may tolerate higher paging overhead than an
> >    interactive job. That means more of its pages could be trimmed from
> >    RAM and reloaded on-demand from disk.
> >
> >    But also, it depends on the storage device. If you move a workload
> >    from a machine with a slow disk to a machine with a fast disk, you
> >    can page more data in the same amount of time. That means while
> >    your workload tolerances stays the same, the faster the disk, the
> >    more aggressively you can do reclaim and offload memory.
> >
> >    So again, what should a user write to such a control file?
> >
> >    Of course, you can approximate an optimal target size for the
> >    workload. You can run a manual workingset analysis with page_idle,
> >    damon, or similar, determine a hot/cold cutoff based on what you
> >    know about the storage characteristics, then echo a number of pages
> >    or a size target into a cgroup file and let kernel do the reclaim
> >    accordingly. The drawbacks are that the kernel LRU may do a
> >    different hot/cold classification than you did and evict the wrong
> >    pages, the storage device latencies may vary based on overall IO
> >    pattern, and two equally warm pages may have very different paging
> >    overhead depending on whether readahead can avert a major fault or
> >    not. So it's easy to overshoot the tolerance target and disrupt the
> >    workload, or undershoot and have stale LRU data, waste memory etc.
> >
> >    You can also do a feedback loop, where you guess an optimal size,
> >    then adjust based on how much paging overhead the workload is
> >    experiencing, i.e. memory pressure. The drawbacks are that you have
> >    to monitor pressure closely and react quickly when the workload is
> >    expanding, as it can be potentially sensitive to latencies in the
> >    usec range. This can be tricky to do from userspace.
> >
> 
> This is actually what we do in our production i.e. feedback loop to
> adjust the next iteration of proactive reclaim.

That's what we do also right now. It works reasonably well, the only
two pain points are/have been the reaction time under quick workload
expansion and inadvertently forcing the workload into direct reclaim.

> We eliminated the IO or slow disk issues you mentioned by only
> focusing on anon memory and doing zswap.

Interesting, may I ask how the file cache is managed in this setup?

> >    So instead of asking users for a target size whose suitability
> >    heavily depends on the kernel's LRU implementation, the readahead
> >    code, the IO device's capability and general load, why not directly
> >    ask the user for a pressure level that the workload is comfortable
> >    with and which captures all of the above factors implicitly? Then
> >    let the kernel do this feedback loop from a per-cgroup worker.
> 
> I am assuming here by pressure level you are referring to the PSI like
> interface e.g. allowing the users to tell about their jobs that X
> amount of stalls in a fixed time window is tolerable.

Right, essentially the same parameters that psi poll() would take.

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