On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 14:47:33 -0400 Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The page cache and most shrinkable slab caches hold data that has been > read from disk, but there are some caches that only cache CPU work, > such as the dentry and inode caches of procfs and sysfs, as well as > the subset of radix tree nodes that track non-resident page cache. > > Currently, all these are shrunk at the same rate: using DEFAULT_SEEKS > for the shrinker's seeks setting tells the reclaim algorithm that for > every two page cache pages scanned it should scan one slab object. > > This is a bogus setting. A virtual inode that required no IO to create > is not twice as valuable as a page cache page; shadow cache entries > with eviction distances beyond the size of memory aren't either. > > In most cases, the behavior in practice is still fine. Such virtual > caches don't tend to grow and assert themselves aggressively, and > usually get picked up before they cause problems. But there are > scenarios where that's not true. > > Our database workloads suffer from two of those. For one, their file > workingset is several times bigger than available memory, which has > the kernel aggressively create shadow page cache entries for the > non-resident parts of it. The workingset code does tell the VM that > most of these are expendable, but the VM ends up balancing them 2:1 to > cache pages as per the seeks setting. This is a huge waste of memory. > > These workloads also deal with tens of thousands of open files and use > /proc for introspection, which ends up growing the proc_inode_cache to > absurdly large sizes - again at the cost of valuable cache space, > which isn't a reasonable trade-off, given that proc inodes can be > re-created without involving the disk. > > This patch implements a "zero-seek" setting for shrinkers that results > in a target ratio of 0:1 between their objects and IO-backed > caches. This allows such virtual caches to grow when memory is > available (they do cache/avoid CPU work after all), but effectively > disables them as soon as IO-backed objects are under pressure. > > It then switches the shrinkers for procfs and sysfs metadata, as well > as excess page cache shadow nodes, to the new zero-seek setting. > Seems sane, but I'm somewhat worried about unexpected effects on other workloads. So I think I'll hold this over for 4.20. Or shouldn't I?
