Re: [RFC 0/2] mm: introduce THP deferred setting

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On 27.08.24 15:05, Johannes Weiner wrote:
On Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 01:46:26PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
On 27.08.24 13:09, Johannes Weiner wrote:
On Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 11:37:14AM +0100, Usama Arif wrote:


On 26/08/2024 17:14, Nico Pache wrote:
On Mon, Aug 26, 2024 at 10:47 AM Usama Arif <usamaarif642@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On 26/08/2024 11:40, Nico Pache wrote:
On Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 4:37 PM Nico Pache <npache@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Zi Yan,
On Mon, Jul 29, 2024 at 7:26 PM Zi Yan <ziy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

+Kirill

On 29 Jul 2024, at 18:27, Nico Pache wrote:

We've seen cases were customers switching from RHEL7 to RHEL8 see a
significant increase in the memory footprint for the same workloads.

Through our investigations we found that a large contributing factor to
the increase in RSS was an increase in THP usage.

Any knob is changed from RHEL7 to RHEL8 to cause more THP usage?
IIRC, most of the systems tuning is the same. We attributed the
increase in THP usage to a combination of improvements in the kernel,
and improvements in the libraries (better alignments). That allowed
THP allocations to succeed at a higher rate. I can go back and confirm
this tomorrow though.


For workloads like MySQL, or when using allocators like jemalloc, it is
often recommended to set /transparent_hugepages/enabled=never. This is
in part due to performance degradations and increased memory waste.

This series introduces enabled=defer, this setting acts as a middle
ground between always and madvise. If the mapping is MADV_HUGEPAGE, the
page fault handler will act normally, making a hugepage if possible. If
the allocation is not MADV_HUGEPAGE, then the page fault handler will
default to the base size allocation. The caveat is that khugepaged can
still operate on pages thats not MADV_HUGEPAGE.

Why? If user does not explicitly want huge page, why bother providing huge
pages? Wouldn't it increase memory footprint?

So we have "always", which will always try to allocate a THP when it
can. This setting gives good performance in a lot of conditions, but
tends to waste memory. Additionally applications DON'T need to be
modified to take advantage of THPs.

We have "madvise" which will only satisfy allocations that are
MADV_HUGEPAGE, this gives you granular control, and a lot of times
these madvises come from libraries. Unlike "always" you DO need to
modify your application if you want to use THPs.

Then we have "never", which of course, never allocates THPs.

Ok. back to your question, like "madvise", "defer" gives you the
benefits of THPs when you specifically know you want them
(madv_hugepage), but also benefits applications that dont specifically
ask for them (or cant be modified to ask for them), like "always"
does. The applications that dont ask for THPs must wait for khugepaged
to get them (avoid insertions at PF time)-- this curbs a lot of memory
waste, and gives an increased tunability over "always". Another added
benefit is that khugepaged will most likely not operate on short lived
allocations, meaning that only longstanding memory will be collapsed
to THPs.

The memory waste can be tuned with max_ptes_none... lets say you want
~90% of your PMD to be full before collapsing into a huge page. simply
set max_ptes_none=64. or no waste, set max_ptes_none=0, requiring the
512 pages to be present before being collapsed.



This allows for two things... one, applications specifically designed to
use hugepages will get them, and two, applications that don't use
hugepages can still benefit from them without aggressively inserting
THPs at every possible chance. This curbs the memory waste, and defers
the use of hugepages to khugepaged. Khugepaged can then scan the memory
for eligible collapsing.

khugepaged would replace application memory with huge pages without specific
goal. Why not use a user space agent with process_madvise() to collapse
huge pages? Admin might have more knobs to tweak than khugepaged.

The benefits of "always" are that no userspace agent is needed, and
applications dont have to be modified to use madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) to
benefit from THPs. This setting hopes to gain some of the same
benefits without the significant waste of memory and an increased
tunability.

future changes I have in the works are to make khugepaged more
"smart". Moving it away from the round robin fashion it currently
operates in, to instead make smart and informed decisions of what
memory to collapse (and potentially split).

Hopefully that helped explain the motivation for this new setting!

Any last comments before I resend this?

Ive been made aware of
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240730125346.1580150-1-usamaarif642@xxxxxxxxx/T/#u
which introduces THP splitting. These are both trying to achieve the
same thing through different means. Our approach leverages khugepaged
to promote pages, while Usama's uses the reclaim path to demote
hugepages and shrink the underlying memory.

I will leave it up to reviewers to determine which is better; However,
we can't have both, as we'd be introducing trashing conditions.


Hi,

Just inserting this here from my cover letter:

Waiting for khugepaged to scan memory and
collapse pages into THP can be slow and unpredictable in terms of performance
Obviously not part of my patchset here, but I have been testing some
changes to khugepaged to make it more aware of what processes are hot.
Ideally then it can make better choices of what to operate on.
(i.e. you dont know when the collapse will happen), while production
environments require predictable performance. If there is enough memory
available, its better for both performance and predictability to have
a THP from fault time, i.e. THP=always rather than wait for khugepaged
to collapse it, and deal with sparsely populated THPs when the system is
running out of memory.

I just went through your patches, and am not sure why we can't have both?
Fair point, we can. I've been playing around with splitting hugepages
and via khugepaged and was thinking of the trashing conditions there--
but your implementation takes a different approach.
I've been working on performance testing my "defer" changes, once I
find the appropriate workloads I'll try adding your changes to the
mix. I have a feeling my approach is better for latency sensitive
workloads, while yours is better for throughput, but let me find a way
to confirm that.


Hmm, I am not sure if its latency vs throughput.

There are 2 things we probably want to consider, short lived and long lived mappings, and
in each of these situations, having enough memory and running out of memory.

For short lived mappings, I believe reducing page faults is a bigger factor in
improving performance. In that case, khugepaged won't have enough time to work,
so THP=always will perform better than THP=defer. THP=defer in this case will perform
the same as THP=madvise?
If there is enough memory, then the changes I introduced in the shrinker won't cost anything
as the shrinker won't run, and the system performance will be the same as THP=always.
If there is low memory and the shrinker runs, it will only split THPs that have zero-filled
pages more than max_ptes_none, and map the zero-filled pages to shared zero-pages saving memory.
There is ofcourse a cost to splitting and running the shrinker, but hopefully it only splits
underused THPs.

For long lived mappings, reduced TLB misses would be the bigger factor in improving performance.
For the initial run of the application THP=always will perform better wrt TLB misses as
page fault handler will give THPs from start.
Later on in the run, the memory might look similar between THP=always with shrinker and
max_ptes_none < HPAGE_PMD_NR vs THP=defer and max_ptes_none < HPAGE_PMD_NR?
This is because khugepaged will have collapsed pages that might have initially been faulted in.
And collapsing has a cost, which would not have been incurred if the THPs were present from fault.
If there is low memory, then shrinker would split memory (which has a cost as well) and the system
memory would look similar or better than THP=defer, as the shrinker would split THPs that initially
might not have been underused, but are underused at time of memory pressure.

With THP=always + underused shrinker, the cost (splitting) is incurred only if needed and when its needed.
While with THP=defer the cost (higher page faults, higher TLB misses + khugepaged collapse) is incurred all the time,
even if the system might have plenty of memory available and there is no need to take a performance hit.

I agree with this. The defer mode is an improvement over the upstream
status quo, no doubt. However, both defer mode and the shrinker solve
the issue of memory waste under pressure, while the shrinker permits
more desirable behavior when memory is abundant.

So my take is that the shrinker is the way to go, and I don't see a
bonafide usecase for defer mode that the shrinker couldn't cover.

Page fault latency? IOW, zeroing a complete THP, which might be up to
512 MiB on arm64. This is one of the things people bring up, where
FreeBSD is different because it will zero fragments on-demand (but also
result in more pagefaults).

Good point, I suppose this could matter to some workloads. Would be
interesting to get real world data on that if that's the argument.

IIRC, there is mentioning about some of these workloads in THP optimization papers, where even the cost of defragmenation+reclaim+zeroing of 2MiB apparently affects some latency-sensitive workloads.

But the challenge that THP-deferred and the shrinker is trying to solve right now is more towards memory over-allocation, and for the the shrinker should *mostly* be able to do what the deferred option would achieve.

There are these corner cases where a workload accesses some pages and then long-term pins them (e.g., iouring fixed buffers), where the over-allcoation cannot be reclaimed until the longterm pin is gone.

But it's not been raised to be a real problem in practice, so I'm just mentioning it as a key difference: the shrinker runs after memory over-allocation with the cost of memory scanning and temporary memory overallcoation+zeroing. "deferred" avoids memory over-allocation, with the cost of more page faults + relying on khugepaged making progress.


Btw, I'm curious if anybody actually uses or tried to use 512MB
THPs. I understand it's technically possible, and there are usecases
for 1G pages through static hugetlb management, but 512M seems wild
for a "real" page size - real as in: allocated on-demand and actually
paged to/from storage.

I think it's less a matter of "using" or trying", but more THPs being default enabled in many setups nowadays, and if you have sufficient memory in the system, even these weird 512MiB THPs will up in your address space if a (sparse) VMA is large enough :)

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb





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