We're trying to use memory.high to limit workloads, but have found that
containment can frequently fail completely and cause OOM situations
outside of the cgroup. This happens especially with swap space -- either
when none is configured, or swap is full. These failures often also
don't have enough warning to allow one to react, whether for a human or
for a daemon monitoring PSI.
Here is output from a simple program showing how long it takes in μsec
(column 2) to allocate a megabyte of anonymous memory (column 1) when a
cgroup is already beyond its memory high setting, and no swap is
available:
[root@ktst ~]# systemd-run -p MemoryHigh=100M -p MemorySwapMax=1 \
> --wait -t timeout 300 /root/mdf
[...]
95 1035
96 1038
97 1000
98 1036
99 1048
100 1590
101 1968
102 1776
103 1863
104 1757
105 1921
106 1893
107 1760
108 1748
109 1843
110 1716
111 1924
112 1776
113 1831
114 1766
115 1836
116 1588
117 1912
118 1802
119 1857
120 1731
[...]
[System OOM in 2-3 seconds]
The delay does go up extremely marginally past the 100MB memory.high
threshold, as now we spend time scanning before returning to usermode,
but it's nowhere near enough to contain growth. It also doesn't get
worse the more pages you have, since it only considers nr_pages.
The current situation goes against both the expectations of users of
memory.high, and our intentions as cgroup v2 developers. In
cgroup-v2.txt, we claim that we will throttle and only under "extreme
conditions" will memory.high protection be breached. Likewise, cgroup v2
users generally also expect that memory.high should throttle workloads
as they exceed their high threshold. However, as seen above, this isn't
always how it works in practice -- even on banal setups like those with
no swap, or where swap has become exhausted, we can end up with
memory.high being breached and us having no weapons left in our arsenal
to combat runaway growth with, since reclaim is futile.
It's also hard for system monitoring software or users to tell how bad
the situation is, as "high" events for the memcg may in some cases be
benign, and in others be catastrophic. The current status quo is that we
fail containment in a way that doesn't provide any advance warning that
things are about to go horribly wrong (for example, we are about to
invoke the kernel OOM killer).
This patch introduces explicit throttling when reclaim is failing to
keep memcg size contained at the memory.high setting. It does so by
applying an exponential delay curve derived from the memcg's overage
compared to memory.high. In the normal case where the memcg is either
below or only marginally over its memory.high setting, no throttling
will be performed.
This composes well with system health monitoring and remediation, as
these allocator delays are factored into PSI's memory pressure
calculations. This both creates a mechanism system administrators or
applications consuming the PSI interface to trivially see that the memcg
in question is struggling and use that to make more reasonable
decisions, and permits them enough time to act. Either of these can act
with significantly more nuance than that we can provide using the system
OOM killer.
This is a similar idea to memory.oom_control in cgroup v1 which would
put the cgroup to sleep if the threshold was violated, but it's also
significantly improved as it results in visible memory pressure, and
also doesn't schedule indefinitely, which previously made tracing and
other introspection difficult (ie. it's clamped at 2*HZ per allocation
through MEMCG_MAX_HIGH_DELAY_JIFFIES).
Contrast the previous results with a kernel with this patch:
[root@ktst ~]# systemd-run -p MemoryHigh=100M -p MemorySwapMax=1 \
> --wait -t timeout 300 /root/mdf
[...]
95 1002
96 1000
97 1002
98 1003
99 1000
100 1043
101 84724
102 330628
103 610511
104 1016265
105 1503969
106 2391692
107 2872061
108 3248003
109 4791904
110 5759832
111 6912509
112 8127818
113 9472203
114 12287622
115 12480079
116 14144008
117 15808029
118 16384500
119 16383242
120 16384979
[...]
As you can see, in the normal case, memory allocation takes around 1000
μsec. However, as we exceed our memory.high, things start to increase
exponentially, but fairly leniently at first. Our first megabyte over
memory.high takes us 0.16 seconds, then the next is 0.46 seconds, then
the next is almost an entire second. This gets worse until we reach our
eventual 2*HZ clamp per batch, resulting in 16 seconds per megabyte.
However, this is still making forward progress, so permits tracing or
further analysis with programs like GDB.
We use an exponential curve for our delay penalty for a few reasons:
1. We run mem_cgroup_handle_over_high to potentially do reclaim after
we've already performed allocations, which means that temporarily
going over memory.high by a small amount may be perfectly legitimate,
even for compliant workloads. We don't want to unduly penalise such
cases.
2. An exponential curve (as opposed to a static or linear delay) allows
ramping up memory pressure stats more gradually, which can be useful
to work out that you have set memory.high too low, without destroying
application performance entirely.
This patch expands on earlier work by Johannes Weiner. Thanks!
Signed-off-by: Chris Down <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <guro@xxxxxx>
Cc: linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: cgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-mm@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: kernel-team@xxxxxx
---
mm/memcontrol.c | 118 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
1 file changed, 117 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
[v3: updated the changelog post discussion in person with Michal.]
diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
index 2535e54e7989..e12fec0d4b58 100644
--- a/mm/memcontrol.c
+++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
@@ -66,6 +66,7 @@
#include <linux/lockdep.h>
#include <linux/file.h>
#include <linux/tracehook.h>
+#include <linux/psi.h>
#include "internal.h"
#include <net/sock.h>
#include <net/ip.h>
@@ -2263,12 +2264,68 @@ static void high_work_func(struct work_struct *work)
reclaim_high(memcg, MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH, GFP_KERNEL);
}
+/*
+ * Clamp the maximum sleep time per allocation batch to 2 seconds. This is
+ * enough to still cause a significant slowdown in most cases, while still
+ * allowing diagnostics and tracing to proceed without becoming stuck.
+ */
+#define MEMCG_MAX_HIGH_DELAY_JIFFIES (2UL*HZ)
+
+/*
+ * When calculating the delay, we use these either side of the exponentiation to
+ * maintain precision and scale to a reasonable number of jiffies (see the table
+ * below.
+ *
+ * - MEMCG_DELAY_PRECISION_SHIFT: Extra precision bits while translating the
+ * overage ratio to a delay.
+ * - MEMCG_DELAY_SCALING_SHIFT: The number of bits to scale down down the
+ * proposed penalty in order to reduce to a reasonable number of jiffies, and
+ * to produce a reasonable delay curve.
+ *
+ * MEMCG_DELAY_SCALING_SHIFT just happens to be a number that produces a
+ * reasonable delay curve compared to precision-adjusted overage, not
+ * penalising heavily at first, but still making sure that growth beyond the
+ * limit penalises misbehaviour cgroups by slowing them down exponentially. For
+ * example, with a high of 100 megabytes:
+ *
+ * +-------+------------------------+
+ * | usage | time to allocate in ms |
+ * +-------+------------------------+
+ * | 100M | 0 |
+ * | 101M | 6 |
+ * | 102M | 25 |
+ * | 103M | 57 |
+ * | 104M | 102 |
+ * | 105M | 159 |
+ * | 106M | 230 |
+ * | 107M | 313 |
+ * | 108M | 409 |
+ * | 109M | 518 |
+ * | 110M | 639 |
+ * | 111M | 774 |
+ * | 112M | 921 |
+ * | 113M | 1081 |
+ * | 114M | 1254 |
+ * | 115M | 1439 |
+ * | 116M | 1638 |
+ * | 117M | 1849 |
+ * | 118M | 2000 |
+ * | 119M | 2000 |
+ * | 120M | 2000 |
+ * +-------+------------------------+
+ */
+ #define MEMCG_DELAY_PRECISION_SHIFT 20
+ #define MEMCG_DELAY_SCALING_SHIFT 14
+
/*
* Scheduled by try_charge() to be executed from the userland return path
* and reclaims memory over the high limit.
*/
void mem_cgroup_handle_over_high(void)
{
+ unsigned long usage, high;
+ unsigned long pflags;
+ unsigned long penalty_jiffies, overage;
unsigned int nr_pages = current->memcg_nr_pages_over_high;
struct mem_cgroup *memcg = current->memcg_high_reclaim;
@@ -2279,9 +2336,68 @@ void mem_cgroup_handle_over_high(void)
memcg = get_mem_cgroup_from_mm(current->mm);
reclaim_high(memcg, nr_pages, GFP_KERNEL);
- css_put(&memcg->css);
current->memcg_high_reclaim = NULL;
current->memcg_nr_pages_over_high = 0;
+
+ /*
+ * memory.high is breached and reclaim is unable to keep up. Throttle
+ * allocators proactively to slow down excessive growth.
+ *
+ * We use overage compared to memory.high to calculate the number of
+ * jiffies to sleep (penalty_jiffies). Ideally this value should be
+ * fairly lenient on small overages, and increasingly harsh when the
+ * memcg in question makes it clear that it has no intention of stopping
+ * its crazy behaviour, so we exponentially increase the delay based on
+ * overage amount.
+ */
+
+ usage = page_counter_read(&memcg->memory);
+ high = READ_ONCE(memcg->high);
+
+ if (usage <= high)
+ goto out;
+
+ overage = ((u64)(usage - high) << MEMCG_DELAY_PRECISION_SHIFT) / high;
+ penalty_jiffies = ((u64)overage * overage * HZ)
+ >> (MEMCG_DELAY_PRECISION_SHIFT + MEMCG_DELAY_SCALING_SHIFT);
+
+ /*
+ * Factor in the task's own contribution to the overage, such that four
+ * N-sized allocations are throttled approximately the same as one
+ * 4N-sized allocation.
+ *
+ * MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH pages is nominal, so work out how much smaller or
+ * larger the current charge patch is than that.
+ */
+ penalty_jiffies = penalty_jiffies * nr_pages / MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH;
+
+ /*
+ * Clamp the max delay per usermode return so as to still keep the
+ * application moving forwards and also permit diagnostics, albeit
+ * extremely slowly.
+ */
+ penalty_jiffies = min(penalty_jiffies, MEMCG_MAX_HIGH_DELAY_JIFFIES);
+
+ /*
+ * Don't sleep if the amount of jiffies this memcg owes us is so low
+ * that it's not even worth doing, in an attempt to be nice to those who
+ * go only a small amount over their memory.high value and maybe haven't
+ * been aggressively reclaimed enough yet.
+ */
+ if (penalty_jiffies <= HZ / 100)
+ goto out;
+
+ /*
+ * If we exit early, we're guaranteed to die (since
+ * schedule_timeout_killable sets TASK_KILLABLE). This means we don't
+ * need to account for any ill-begotten jiffies to pay them off later.
+ */
+ psi_memstall_enter(&pflags);
+ schedule_timeout_killable(penalty_jiffies);
+ psi_memstall_leave(&pflags);
+
+out:
+ css_put(&memcg->css);
}
static int try_charge(struct mem_cgroup *memcg, gfp_t gfp_mask,
--
2.21.0
