Commit "mm: vmscan: obey proportional scanning requirements for kswapd"
ensured that file/anon lists were scanned proportionally for reclaim from
kswapd but ignored it for direct reclaim. The intent was to minimse
direct reclaim latency but Yuanhan Liu pointer out that it substitutes one
long stall for many small stalls and distorts aging for normal workloads
like streaming readers/writers. Hugh Dickins pointed out that a
side-effect of the same commit was that when one LRU list dropped to zero
that the entirety of the other list was shrunk leading to excessive
reclaim in memcgs. This patch scans the file/anon lists proportionally
for direct reclaim to similarly age page whether reclaimed by kswapd or
direct reclaim but takes care to abort reclaim if one LRU drops to zero
after reclaiming the requested number of pages.
Based on ext4 and using the Intel VM scalability test
3.15.0-rc5 3.15.0-rc5
shrinker proportion
Unit lru-file-readonce elapsed 5.3500 ( 0.00%) 5.4200 ( -1.31%)
Unit lru-file-readonce time_range 0.2700 ( 0.00%) 0.1400 ( 48.15%)
Unit lru-file-readonce time_stddv 0.1148 ( 0.00%) 0.0536 ( 53.33%)
Unit lru-file-readtwice elapsed 8.1700 ( 0.00%) 8.1700 ( 0.00%)
Unit lru-file-readtwice time_range 0.4300 ( 0.00%) 0.2300 ( 46.51%)
Unit lru-file-readtwice time_stddv 0.1650 ( 0.00%) 0.0971 ( 41.16%)
The test cases are running multiple dd instances reading sparse files. The results are within
the noise for the small test machine. The impact of the patch is more noticable from the vmstats
3.15.0-rc5 3.15.0-rc5
shrinker proportion
Minor Faults 35154 36784
Major Faults 611 1305
Swap Ins 394 1651
Swap Outs 4394 5891
Allocation stalls 118616 44781
Direct pages scanned 4935171 4602313
Kswapd pages scanned 15921292 16258483
Kswapd pages reclaimed 15913301 16248305
Direct pages reclaimed 4933368 4601133
Kswapd efficiency 99% 99%
Kswapd velocity 670088.047 682555.961
Direct efficiency 99% 99%
Direct velocity 207709.217 193212.133
Percentage direct scans 23% 22%
Page writes by reclaim 4858.000 6232.000
Page writes file 464 341
Page writes anon 4394 5891
Note that there are fewer allocation stalls even though the amount
of direct reclaim scanning is very approximately the same.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Tested-by: Yuanhan Liu <yuanhan.liu@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Bob Liu <bob.liu@oracle.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1a501907bb