Re: [PATCH] mm: fix low-high watermark distance on small systems

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Hi Vinayak,

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 04:04:39PM +0530, Vinayak Menon wrote:
> It is observed that watermark_scale_factor when used to reduce
> thundering herds in direct reclaim, reduces the direct reclaims,
> but results in unnecessary reclaim due to kswapd running for long
> after being woken up. The tests are done with 4 GB of RAM and the
> tests done are multibuild and another which opens a set of apps
> sequentially on Android and repeating the sequence N times. The
> tests are done on 4.9 kernel.
> 
> The issue is caused by watermark_scale_factor creating larger than
> required gap between low and high watermarks. The following results
> are with watermark_scale_factor of 120.
> 
>                        wsf-120-default  wsf-120-reduced-low-high-gap
> workingset_activate    15120206         8319182
> pgpgin                 269795482        147928581
> allocstall             1406             1498
> pgsteal_kswapd         68676960         38105142
> slabs_scanned          94181738         49085755

"required gap" you mentiond is very dependent for your workload.
You had an experiment with wsf-120. It means user wanted to be more
aggressive for kswapd while your load is not enough to make meomry
consumption spike. Couldn't you decrease wfs?

Don't get me wrong. I don't want you test all of wfs with varios
workload to prove your logic is better. What I want to say here is
it's heuristic so it couldn't be perfect for every workload so
if you change to non-linear, you could be better but others might be not.

In such context, current linear linear scale factor is simple enough
to understand. IMO, if we really want to enhance watermark, the low/high
wmark shold be adaptable according to memory spike. One of rough idea is
to change low/high wmark based on kswapd_[high|low]_wmark_hit_quickly.

> 
> Even though kswapd does 80% more steal in the default case, it doesn't
> make any significant improvement to the direct reclaims. The excessive
> reclaims cause more pgpgin and increases app launch latencies.
> 
> The min-low gap is untouched by the patch. The low-high gap is made
> a percentage of min-low gap. The fraction was derived considering
> these,
> 
> 1) The existing watermark_scale_factor logic was designed to fix
> issues on high RAM machines and I assume that the current low-high
> gap works well on those.
> 2) The gap should be reduced on low RAM targets where thrashing is
> observed.
> 
> The multiplier 4 was chosen empirically which was seen to fix the
> thrashing on <8GB devices.
> 
> With watermark_scale_factor as default 10, the low-high gap for different
> memory sizes.
>            default-low_high_gap-pages  this-patch-low_high_gap-pages
> 16M        4                           4
> 512M       131                         131
> 1024M      262                         256
> 2048M      524                         362
> 4096M      1048                        512
> 8192M      2097                        724
> 16384M     4194                        1717
> 32768M     8388                        4858
> 65536M     16777                       13743
> 102400M    26214                       26214
> 143360M    36700                       36700
> 
> Signed-off-by: Vinayak Menon <vinmenon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  mm/page_alloc.c | 15 ++++++++++++++-
>  1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
> index c0f0b1b..ac75985 100644
> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> @@ -7223,7 +7223,20 @@ static void __setup_per_zone_wmarks(void)
>  				      watermark_scale_factor, 10000));
>  
>  		zone->watermark[WMARK_LOW]  = min_wmark_pages(zone) + tmp;
> -		zone->watermark[WMARK_HIGH] = min_wmark_pages(zone) + tmp * 2;
> +
> +		/*
> +		 * Set the kswapd low-high distance as a percentage of
> +		 * min-low distance in such a way that the distance
> +		 * increases non-linearly with available memory. This
> +		 * ensures enough free memory without causing thrashing
> +		 * on small machines due to excessive reclaim by kswapd.
> +		 * Ensure a minimum distance on very small machines.
> +		 */
> +		tmp = clamp_t(u64, mult_frac(tmp,
> +				int_sqrt(4 * zone->managed_pages), 10000),
> +					min_wmark_pages(zone) >> 2, tmp);
> +
> +		zone->watermark[WMARK_HIGH] = low_wmark_pages(zone) + tmp;
>  
>  		spin_unlock_irqrestore(&zone->lock, flags);
>  	}
> -- 
> QUALCOMM INDIA, on behalf of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a
> member of the Code Aurora Forum, hosted by The Linux Foundation
> 




[Index of Archives]     [Linux ARM Kernel]     [Linux ARM]     [Linux Omap]     [Fedora ARM]     [IETF Annouce]     [Bugtraq]     [Linux OMAP]     [Linux MIPS]     [eCos]     [Asterisk Internet PBX]     [Linux API]

  Powered by Linux