linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2] mm/madvise: add vmstat statistics for madvise

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Date:   Wed, 25 Jan 2023 22:37:59 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
To:     Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] mm/madvise: add vmstat statistics for
 madvise_[cold|pageout]

On Wed 25-01-23 10:07:49, Minchan Kim wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 06:07:00PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Wed 25-01-23 08:36:02, Minchan Kim wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 09:04:16AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > > On Tue 24-01-23 16:54:57, Minchan Kim wrote:
> > > > > madvise LRU manipulation APIs need to scan address ranges to find
> > > > > present pages at page table and provides advice hints for them.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Likewise pg[scan/steal] count on vmstat, madvise_pg[scanned/hinted]
> > > > > shows the proactive reclaim efficiency so this patch adds those
> > > > > two statistics in vmstat.
> > > > > 
> > > > > 	madvise_pgscanned, madvise_pghinted
> > > > > 
> > > > > Since proactive reclaim using process_madvise(2) as userland
> > > > > memory policy is popular(e.g,. Android ActivityManagerService),
> > > > > those stats are helpful to know how efficiently the policy works
> > > > > well.
> > > > 
> > > > The usecase description is still too vague. What are those values useful
> > > > for? Is there anything actionable based on those numbers? How do you
> > > > deal with multiple parties using madvise resp. process_madvise so that
> > > > their stats are combined?
> > > 
> > > The metric helps monitoing system MM health under fleet and experimental
> > > tuning with diffrent policies from the centralized userland memory daemon.
> > 
> > That is just too vague for me to imagine anything more specific then, we
> > have numbers and we can show them in a report. What does it actually
> > mean that madvise_pgscanned is high. Or that pghinted / pgscanned is
> > low (that you tend to manually reclaim sparse mappings)?
> 
> If that's low, it means the userspace daemon's current tune/policy are
> inefficient or too aggressive since it is working on address spacess
> of processes which don't have enough memory the hint can work(e.g.,
> shared addresses, cold address ranges or some special address ranges like
> VM_PFNMAP) so sometime, we can detect regression to find culprit or
> have a chance to look into better ideas to improve.

Are you sure this is really meaningful metric? Just consider a large and
sparsely populated mapping. This can be a perfect candidate for user
space reclaim target (e.g. consider a mapping covering a large matrix
or other similar data structure). pghinted/pgscanned would be really
small while the reclaim efficiency could be quite high in that case,
wouldn't it?
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs