Date:   Thu, 14 Sep 2023 13:36:44 -0400
From:   Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>
To:     Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@...gle.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>,
        Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@...ux.dev>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@...gle.com>,
        Muchun Song <muchun.song@...ux.dev>,
        Ivan Babrou <ivan@...udflare.com>, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
        Michal Koutný <mkoutny@...e.com>,
        kernel-team@...udflare.com, Wei Xu <weixugc@...gle.com>,
        Greg Thelen <gthelen@...gle.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        cgroups@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] mm: memcg: optimize stats flushing for latency and
 accuracy


On 9/14/23 13:23, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2023 at 10:19 AM Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 9/13/23 03:38, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
>>> Stats flushing for memcg currently follows the following rules:
>>> - Always flush the entire memcg hierarchy (i.e. flush the root).
>>> - Only one flusher is allowed at a time. If someone else tries to flush
>>>     concurrently, they skip and return immediately.
>>> - A periodic flusher flushes all the stats every 2 seconds.
>>>
>>> The reason this approach is followed is because all flushes are
>>> serialized by a global rstat spinlock. On the memcg side, flushing is
>>> invoked from userspace reads as well as in-kernel flushers (e.g.
>>> reclaim, refault, etc). This approach aims to avoid serializing all
>>> flushers on the global lock, which can cause a significant performance
>>> hit under high concurrency.
>>>
>>> This approach has the following problems:
>>> - Occasionally a userspace read of the stats of a non-root cgroup will
>>>     be too expensive as it has to flush the entire hierarchy [1].
>>> - Sometimes the stats accuracy are compromised if there is an ongoing
>>>     flush, and we skip and return before the subtree of interest is
>>>     actually flushed. This is more visible when reading stats from
>>>     userspace, but can also affect in-kernel flushers.
>>>
>>> This patch aims to solve both problems by reworking how flushing
>>> currently works as follows:
>>> - Without contention, there is no need to flush the entire tree. In this
>>>     case, only flush the subtree of interest. This avoids the latency of a
>>>     full root flush if unnecessary.
>>> - With contention, fallback to a coalesced (aka unified) flush of the
>>>     entire hierarchy, a root flush. In this case, instead of returning
>>>     immediately if a root flush is ongoing, wait for it to finish
>>>     *without* attempting to acquire the lock or flush. This is done using
>>>     a completion. Compared to competing directly on the underlying lock,
>>>     this approach makes concurrent flushing a synchronization point
>>>     instead of a serialization point. Once  a root flush finishes, *all*
>>>     waiters can wake up and continue at once.
>>> - Finally, with very high contention, bound the number of waiters to the
>>>     number of online cpus. This keeps the flush latency bounded at the tail
>>>     (very high concurrency). We fallback to sacrificing stats freshness only
>>>     in such cases in favor of performance.
>>>
>>> This was tested in two ways on a machine with 384 cpus:
>>> - A synthetic test with 5000 concurrent workers doing allocations and
>>>     reclaim, as well as 1000 readers for memory.stat (variation of [2]).
>>>     No significant regressions were noticed in the total runtime.
>>>     Note that if concurrent flushers compete directly on the spinlock
>>>     instead of waiting for a completion, this test shows 2x-3x slowdowns.
>>>     Even though subsequent flushers would have nothing to flush, just the
>>>     serialization and lock contention is a major problem. Using a
>>>     completion for synchronization instead seems to overcome this problem.
>>>
>>> - A synthetic stress test for concurrently reading memcg stats provided
>>>     by Wei Xu.
>>>     With 10k threads reading the stats every 100ms:
>>>     - 98.8% of reads take <100us
>>>     - 1.09% of reads take 100us to 1ms.
>>>     - 0.11% of reads take 1ms to 10ms.
>>>     - Almost no reads take more than 10ms.
>>>     With 10k threads reading the stats every 10ms:
>>>     - 82.3% of reads take <100us.
>>>     - 4.2% of reads take 100us to 1ms.
>>>     - 4.7% of reads take 1ms to 10ms.
>>>     - 8.8% of reads take 10ms to 100ms.
>>>     - Almost no reads take more than 100ms.
>>>
>>> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CABWYdi0c6__rh-K7dcM_pkf9BJdTRtAU08M43KO9ME4-dsgfoQ@mail.gmail.com/
>>> [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAJD7tka13M-zVZTyQJYL1iUAYvuQ1fcHbCjcOBZcz6POYTV-4g@mail.gmail.com/
>>> [3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAAPL-u9D2b=iF5Lf_cRnKxUfkiEe0AMDTu6yhrUAzX0b6a6rDg@mail.gmail.com/
>>>
>>> [weixugc@...gle.com: suggested the fallback logic and bounding the
>>> number of waiters]
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@...gle.com>
>>> ---
>>>    include/linux/memcontrol.h |   4 +-
>>>    mm/memcontrol.c            | 100 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
>>>    mm/vmscan.c                |   2 +-
>>>    mm/workingset.c            |   8 ++-
>>>    4 files changed, 85 insertions(+), 29 deletions(-)
>>>
>>> diff --git a/include/linux/memcontrol.h b/include/linux/memcontrol.h
>>> index 11810a2cfd2d..4453cd3fc4b8 100644
>>> --- a/include/linux/memcontrol.h
>>> +++ b/include/linux/memcontrol.h
>>> @@ -1034,7 +1034,7 @@ static inline unsigned long lruvec_page_state_local(struct lruvec *lruvec,
>>>        return x;
>>>    }
>>>
>>> -void mem_cgroup_flush_stats(void);
>>> +void mem_cgroup_flush_stats(struct mem_cgroup *memcg);
>>>    void mem_cgroup_flush_stats_ratelimited(void);
>>>
>>>    void __mod_memcg_lruvec_state(struct lruvec *lruvec, enum node_stat_item idx,
>>> @@ -1519,7 +1519,7 @@ static inline unsigned long lruvec_page_state_local(struct lruvec *lruvec,
>>>        return node_page_state(lruvec_pgdat(lruvec), idx);
>>>    }
>>>
>>> -static inline void mem_cgroup_flush_stats(void)
>>> +static inline void mem_cgroup_flush_stats(struct mem_cgroup *memcg)
>>>    {
>>>    }
>>>
>>> diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
>>> index d729870505f1..edff41e4b4e7 100644
>>> --- a/mm/memcontrol.c
>>> +++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
>>> @@ -588,7 +588,6 @@ mem_cgroup_largest_soft_limit_node(struct mem_cgroup_tree_per_node *mctz)
>>>    static void flush_memcg_stats_dwork(struct work_struct *w);
>>>    static DECLARE_DEFERRABLE_WORK(stats_flush_dwork, flush_memcg_stats_dwork);
>>>    static DEFINE_PER_CPU(unsigned int, stats_updates);
>>> -static atomic_t stats_flush_ongoing = ATOMIC_INIT(0);
>>>    /* stats_updates_order is in multiples of MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH */
>>>    static atomic_t stats_updates_order = ATOMIC_INIT(0);
>>>    static u64 flush_last_time;
>>> @@ -639,36 +638,87 @@ static inline void memcg_rstat_updated(struct mem_cgroup *memcg, int val)
>>>        }
>>>    }
>>>
>>> -static void do_flush_stats(void)
>>> +/*
>>> + * do_flush_stats - flush the statistics of a memory cgroup and its tree
>>> + * @memcg: the memory cgroup to flush
>>> + * @wait: wait for an ongoing root flush to complete before returning
>>> + *
>>> + * All flushes are serialized by the underlying rstat global lock. If there is
>>> + * no contention, we try to only flush the subtree of the passed @memcg to
>>> + * minimize the work. Otherwise, we coalesce multiple flushing requests into a
>>> + * single flush of the root memcg. When there is an ongoing root flush, we wait
>>> + * for its completion (unless otherwise requested), to get fresh stats. If the
>>> + * number of waiters exceeds the number of cpus just skip the flush to bound the
>>> + * flush latency at the tail with very high concurrency.
>>> + *
>>> + * This is a trade-off between stats accuracy and flush latency.
>>> + */
>>> +static void do_flush_stats(struct mem_cgroup *memcg, bool wait)
>>>    {
>>> +     static DECLARE_COMPLETION(root_flush_done);
>>> +     static DEFINE_SPINLOCK(root_flusher_lock);
>>> +     static DEFINE_MUTEX(subtree_flush_mutex);
>>> +     static atomic_t waiters = ATOMIC_INIT(0);
>>> +     static bool root_flush_ongoing;
>>> +     bool root_flusher = false;
>>> +
>>> +     /* Ongoing root flush, just wait for it (unless otherwise requested) */
>>> +     if (READ_ONCE(root_flush_ongoing))
>>> +             goto root_flush_or_wait;
>>> +
>>>        /*
>>> -      * We always flush the entire tree, so concurrent flushers can just
>>> -      * skip. This avoids a thundering herd problem on the rstat global lock
>>> -      * from memcg flushers (e.g. reclaim, refault, etc).
>>> +      * Opportunistically try to only flush the requested subtree. Otherwise
>>> +      * fallback to a coalesced flush below.
>>>         */
>>> -     if (atomic_read(&stats_flush_ongoing) ||
>>> -         atomic_xchg(&stats_flush_ongoing, 1))
>>> +     if (!mem_cgroup_is_root(memcg) && mutex_trylock(&subtree_flush_mutex)) {
>>> +             cgroup_rstat_flush(memcg->css.cgroup);
>>> +             mutex_unlock(&subtree_flush_mutex);
>>>                return;
>>> +     }
>> If mutex_trylock() is the only way to acquire subtree_flush_mutex, you
>> don't really need a mutex. Just a simple integer flag with xchg() call
>> should be enough.

Equivalently test_and_set_bit() will work too.

Cheers,
Longman

> Thanks for pointing this out. Agreed.
>
> If we keep this approach I will drop that mutex.
>

Powered by blists - more mailing lists