mm, vmscan: prevent kswapd sleeping prematurely due to mismatched classzone_idx
kswapd is woken to reclaim a node based on a failed allocation request
from any eligible zone. Once reclaiming in balance_pgdat(), it will
continue reclaiming until there is an eligible zone available for the
zone it was woken for. kswapd tracks what zone it was recently woken
for in pgdat->kswapd_classzone_idx. If it has not been woken recently,
this zone will be 0.
However, the decision on whether to sleep is made on
kswapd_classzone_idx which is 0 without a recent wakeup request and that
classzone does not account for lowmem reserves. This allows kswapd to
sleep when a low small zone such as ZONE_DMA is balanced for a GFP_DMA
request even if a stream of allocations cannot use that zone. While
kswapd may be woken again shortly in the near future there are two
consequences -- the pgdat bits that control congestion are cleared
prematurely and direct reclaim is more likely as kswapd slept
prematurely.
This patch flips kswapd_classzone_idx to default to MAX_NR_ZONES (an
invalid index) when there has been no recent wakeups. If there are no
wakeups, it'll decide whether to sleep based on the highest possible
zone available (MAX_NR_ZONES - 1). It then becomes critical that the
"pgdat balanced" decisions during reclaim and when deciding to sleep are
the same. If there is a mismatch, kswapd can stay awake continually
trying to balance tiny zones.
simoop was used to evaluate it again. Two of the preparation patches
regressed the workload so they are included as the second set of
results. Otherwise this patch looks artifically excellent
4.11.0-rc1 4.11.0-rc1 4.11.0-rc1
vanilla clear-v2 keepawake-v2
Amean p50-Read 21670074.18 ( 0.00%) 19786774.76 ( 8.69%) 22668332.52 ( -4.61%)
Amean p95-Read 25456267.64 ( 0.00%) 24101956.27 ( 5.32%) 26738688.00 ( -5.04%)
Amean p99-Read 29369064.73 ( 0.00%) 27691872.71 ( 5.71%) 30991404.52 ( -5.52%)
Amean p50-Write 1390.30 ( 0.00%) 1011.91 ( 27.22%) 924.91 ( 33.47%)
Amean p95-Write 412901.57 ( 0.00%) 34874.98 ( 91.55%) 1362.62 ( 99.67%)
Amean p99-Write 6668722.09 ( 0.00%) 575449.60 ( 91.37%) 16854.04 ( 99.75%)
Amean p50-Allocation 78714.31 ( 0.00%) 84246.26 ( -7.03%) 74729.74 ( 5.06%)
Amean p95-Allocation 175533.51 ( 0.00%) 400058.43 (-127.91%) 101609.74 ( 42.11%)
Amean p99-Allocation 247003.02 ( 0.00%) 10905600.00 (-4315.17%) 125765.57 ( 49.08%)
With this patch on top, write and allocation latencies are massively
improved. The read latencies are slightly impaired but it's worth
noting that this is mostly due to the IO scheduler and not directly
related to reclaim. The vmstats are a bit of a mix but the relevant
ones are as follows;
4.10.0-rc7 4.10.0-rc7 4.10.0-rc7
mmots-20170209 clear-v1r25keepawake-v1r25
Swap Ins 0 0 0
Swap Outs 0 608 0
Direct pages scanned 6910672 3132699 6357298
Kswapd pages scanned 57036946 82488665 56986286
Kswapd pages reclaimed 55993488 63474329 55939113
Direct pages reclaimed 6905990 2964843 6352115
Kswapd efficiency 98% 76% 98%
Kswapd velocity 12494.375 17597.507 12488.065
Direct efficiency 99% 94% 99%
Direct velocity 1513.835 668.306 1393.148
Page writes by reclaim 0.000 4410243.000 0.000
Page writes file 0 4409635 0
Page writes anon 0 608 0
Page reclaim immediate 1036792 14175203 1042571
4.11.0-rc1 4.11.0-rc1 4.11.0-rc1
vanilla clear-v2 keepawake-v2
Swap Ins 0 12 0
Swap Outs 0 838 0
Direct pages scanned 6579706 3237270 6256811
Kswapd pages scanned 61853702 79961486 54837791
Kswapd pages reclaimed 60768764 60755788 53849586
Direct pages reclaimed 6579055 2987453 6256151
Kswapd efficiency 98% 75% 98%
Page writes by reclaim 0.000 4389496.000 0.000
Page writes file 0 4388658 0
Page writes anon 0 838 0
Page reclaim immediate 1073573 14473009 982507
Swap-outs are equivalent to baseline.
Direct reclaim is reduced but not eliminated. It's worth noting that
there are two periods of direct reclaim for this workload. The first is
when it switches from preparing the files for the actual test itself.
It's a lot of file IO followed by a lot of allocs that reclaims heavily
for a brief window. While direct reclaim is lower with clear-v2, it is
due to kswapd scanning aggressively and trying to reclaim the world
which is not the right thing to do. With the patches applied, there is
still direct reclaim but the phase change from "creating work files" to
starting multiple threads that allocate a lot of anonymous memory faster
than kswapd can reclaim.
Scanning/reclaim efficiency is restored by this patch.
Page writes from reclaim context are back at 0 which is ideal.
Pages immediately reclaimed after IO completes is slightly improved but
it is expected this will vary slightly.
On UMA, there is almost no change so this is not expected to be a
universal win.
[mgorman@suse.de: fix ->kswapd_classzone_idx initialization]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170406174538.5msrznj6nt6qpbx5@suse.de
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170309075657.25121-4-mgorman@techsingularity.net
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@alibaba-inc.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Shantanu Goel <sgoel01@yahoo.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Change-Id: I86921db819b30a5c2f2f05defeb96f2ad4407fe7
Git-commit: e716f2eb24defb33b82be763a3ed9a618a210cee
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git
Signed-off-by: Vinayak Menon <vinmenon@codeaurora.org>
2 files changed