mm: page allocator: initialise ZLC for first zone eligible for zone_reclaim
There have been a small number of complaints about significant stalls
while copying large amounts of data on NUMA machines reported on a
distribution bugzilla. In these cases, zone_reclaim was enabled by
default due to large NUMA distances. In general, the complaints have not
been about the workload itself unless it was a file server (in which case
the recommendation was disable zone_reclaim).
The stalls are mostly due to significant amounts of time spent scanning
the preferred zone for pages to free. After a failure, it might fallback
to another node (as zonelists are often node-ordered rather than
zone-ordered) but stall quickly again when the next allocation attempt
occurs. In bad cases, each page allocated results in a full scan of the
preferred zone.
Patch 1 checks the preferred zone for recent allocation failure
which is particularly important if zone_reclaim has failed
recently. This avoids rescanning the zone in the near future and
instead falling back to another node. This may hurt node locality
in some cases but a failure to zone_reclaim is more expensive than
a remote access.
Patch 2 clears the zlc information after direct reclaim.
Otherwise, zone_reclaim can mark zones full, direct reclaim can
reclaim enough pages but the zone is still not considered for
allocation.
This was tested on a 24-thread 2-node x86_64 machine. The tests were
focused on large amounts of IO. All tests were bound to the CPUs on
node-0 to avoid disturbances due to processes being scheduled on different
nodes. The kernels tested are
3.0-rc6-vanilla Vanilla 3.0-rc6
zlcfirst Patch 1 applied
zlcreconsider Patches 1+2 applied
FS-Mark
./fs_mark -d /tmp/fsmark-10813 -D 100 -N 5000 -n 208 -L 35 -t 24 -S0 -s 524288
fsmark-3.0-rc6 3.0-rc6 3.0-rc6
vanilla zlcfirs zlcreconsider
Files/s min 54.90 ( 0.00%) 49.80 (-10.24%) 49.10 (-11.81%)
Files/s mean 100.11 ( 0.00%) 135.17 (25.94%) 146.93 (31.87%)
Files/s stddev 57.51 ( 0.00%) 138.97 (58.62%) 158.69 (63.76%)
Files/s max 361.10 ( 0.00%) 834.40 (56.72%) 802.40 (55.00%)
Overhead min 76704.00 ( 0.00%) 76501.00 ( 0.27%) 77784.00 (-1.39%)
Overhead mean 1485356.51 ( 0.00%) 1035797.83 (43.40%) 1594680.26 (-6.86%)
Overhead stddev 1848122.53 ( 0.00%) 881489.88 (109.66%) 1772354.90 ( 4.27%)
Overhead max 7989060.00 ( 0.00%) 3369118.00 (137.13%) 10135324.00 (-21.18%)
MMTests Statistics: duration
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 501.49 493.91 499.93
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 2451.57 2257.48 2215.92
MMTests Statistics: vmstat
Page Ins 46268 63840 66008
Page Outs 90821596 90671128 88043732
Swap Ins 0 0 0
Swap Outs 0 0 0
Direct pages scanned 13091697 8966863 8971790
Kswapd pages scanned 0 1830011 1831116
Kswapd pages reclaimed 0 1829068 1829930
Direct pages reclaimed 13037777 8956828 8648314
Kswapd efficiency 100% 99% 99%
Kswapd velocity 0.000 810.643 826.346
Direct efficiency 99% 99% 96%
Direct velocity 5340.128 3972.068 4048.788
Percentage direct scans 100% 83% 83%
Page writes by reclaim 0 3 0
Slabs scanned 796672 720640 720256
Direct inode steals 7422667 7160012 7088638
Kswapd inode steals 0 1736840 2021238
Test completes far faster with a large increase in the number of files
created per second. Standard deviation is high as a small number of
iterations were much higher than the mean. The number of pages scanned by
zone_reclaim is reduced and kswapd is used for more work.
LARGE DD
3.0-rc6 3.0-rc6 3.0-rc6
vanilla zlcfirst zlcreconsider
download tar 59 ( 0.00%) 59 ( 0.00%) 55 ( 7.27%)
dd source files 527 ( 0.00%) 296 (78.04%) 320 (64.69%)
delete source 36 ( 0.00%) 19 (89.47%) 20 (80.00%)
MMTests Statistics: duration
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 125.03 118.98 122.01
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 624.56 375.02 398.06
MMTests Statistics: vmstat
Page Ins 3594216f 439368 407032
Page Outs 23380832 23380488 23377444
Swap Ins 0 0 0
Swap Outs 0 436 287
Direct pages scanned 17482342 69315973 82864918
Kswapd pages scanned 0 519123 575425
Kswapd pages reclaimed 0 466501 522487
Direct pages reclaimed 5858054 2732949 2712547
Kswapd efficiency 100% 89% 90%
Kswapd velocity 0.000 1384.254 1445.574
Direct efficiency 33% 3% 3%
Direct velocity 27991.453 184832.737 208171.929
Percentage direct scans 100% 99% 99%
Page writes by reclaim 0 5082 13917
Slabs scanned 17280 29952 35328
Direct inode steals 115257 1431122 332201
Kswapd inode steals 0 0 979532
This test downloads a large tarfile and copies it with dd a number of
times - similar to the most recent bug report I've dealt with. Time to
completion is reduced. The number of pages scanned directly is still
disturbingly high with a low efficiency but this is likely due to the
number of dirty pages encountered. The figures could probably be improved
with more work around how kswapd is used and how dirty pages are handled
but that is separate work and this result is significant on its own.
Streaming Mapped Writer
MMTests Statistics: duration
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 124.47 111.67 112.64
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 2138.14 1816.30 1867.56
MMTests Statistics: vmstat
Page Ins 90760 89124 89516
Page Outs 121028340 120199524 120736696
Swap Ins 0 86 55
Swap Outs 0 0 0
Direct pages scanned 114989363 96461439 96330619
Kswapd pages scanned 56430948 56965763 57075875
Kswapd pages reclaimed 27743219 27752044 27766606
Direct pages reclaimed 49777 46884 36655
Kswapd efficiency 49% 48% 48%
Kswapd velocity 26392.541 31363.631 30561.736
Direct efficiency 0% 0% 0%
Direct velocity 53780.091 53108.759 51581.004
Percentage direct scans 67% 62% 62%
Page writes by reclaim 385 122 1513
Slabs scanned 43008 39040 42112
Direct inode steals 0 10 8
Kswapd inode steals 733 534 477
This test just creates a large file mapping and writes to it linearly.
Time to completion is again reduced.
The gains are mostly down to two things. In many cases, there is less
scanning as zone_reclaim simply gives up faster due to recent failures.
The second reason is that memory is used more efficiently. Instead of
scanning the preferred zone every time, the allocator falls back to
another zone and uses it instead improving overall memory utilisation.
This patch: initialise ZLC for first zone eligible for zone_reclaim.
The zonelist cache (ZLC) is used among other things to record if
zone_reclaim() failed for a particular zone recently. The intention is to
avoid a high cost scanning extremely long zonelists or scanning within the
zone uselessly.
Currently the zonelist cache is setup only after the first zone has been
considered and zone_reclaim() has been called. The objective was to avoid
a costly setup but zone_reclaim is itself quite expensive. If it is
failing regularly such as the first eligible zone having mostly mapped
pages, the cost in scanning and allocation stalls is far higher than the
ZLC initialisation step.
This patch initialises ZLC before the first eligible zone calls
zone_reclaim(). Once initialised, it is checked whether the zone failed
zone_reclaim recently. If it has, the zone is skipped. As the first zone
is now being checked, additional care has to be taken about zones marked
full. A zone can be marked "full" because it should not have enough
unmapped pages for zone_reclaim but this is excessive as direct reclaim or
kswapd may succeed where zone_reclaim fails. Only mark zones "full" after
zone_reclaim fails if it failed to reclaim enough pages after scanning.
Signed-off-by: 
Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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