On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 10:21:46AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote: > On Fri, 13 May 2011, Mel Gorman wrote: > > > SLUB using high orders is the trigger but not the root cause as SLUB > > has been using high orders for a while. The following four patches > > aim to fix the problems in reclaim while reducing the cost for SLUB > > using those high orders. > > > > Patch 1 corrects logic introduced by commit [1741c877: mm: > > kswapd: keep kswapd awake for high-order allocations until > > a percentage of the node is balanced] to allow kswapd to > > go to sleep when balanced for high orders. > > The above looks good. > Ok. > > Patch 2 prevents kswapd waking up in response to SLUBs speculative > > use of high orders. > > Not sure if that is necessary since it seems that we triggered kswapd > before? Why not continue to do it? Once kswapd has enough higher order > pages kswapd should no longer be triggered right? > Because kswapd waking up isn't cheap and we are reclaiming pages just so SLUB may get high-order pages in the future. As it's for PAGE_ORDER_COSTLY_ORDER, we are not entering lumpy reclaim and just selecting a few random order-0 pages which may or may not help. There is very little control of how many pages are getting freed if kswapd is being woken frequently. > > Patch 3 further reduces the cost by prevent SLUB entering direct > > compaction or reclaim paths on the grounds that falling > > back to order-0 should be cheaper. > > Its cheaper for reclaim path true but more expensive in terms of SLUBs > management costs of the data and it also increases the memory wasted. Surely the reclaim cost exceeds SLUB management cost? > A > higher order means denser packing of objects less page management > overhead. Fallback is not for free. Neither is reclaiming a large bunch of pages. Worse, reclaiming pages so SLUB gets a high-order means it's likely to be stealing MIGRATE_MOVABLE blocks which eventually gives diminishing returns but may not be noticeable for weeks. From a fragmentation perspective, it's better if SLUB uses order-0 allocations when memory is low so that SLUB pages continue to get packed into as few MIGRATE_UNMOVABLE and MIGRATE_UNRECLAIMABLE blocks as possible. > Reasonable effort should be made to > allocate the page order requested. > > > Patch 4 notes that even when kswapd is failing to keep up with > > allocation requests, it should still go to sleep when its > > quota has expired to prevent it spinning. > > Looks good too. > > Overall, it looks like the compaction logic and the modifications to > reclaim introduced recently with the intend to increase the amount of > physically contiguous memory is not working as expected. > The reclaim and kswapd damage was unintended and this is my fault but reclaim/compaction still makes a lot more sense than lumpy reclaim. Testing showed it disrupted the system a lot less and allocated high-order pages faster with fewer pages reclaimed. > SLUBs chance of getting higher order pages should be *increasing* as a > result of these changes. The above looks like the chances are decreasing > now. > Patches 2 and 3 may mean that SLUB gets fewer high order pages when memory is low and it's depending on high-order pages to be naturally freed by SLUB as it recycles slabs of old objects. On the flip-side, fewer pages will be reclaimed. I'd expect the latter option is cheaper overall. > This is a matter of future concern. The metadata management overhead > in the kernel is continually increasing since memory sizes keep growing > and we typically manage memory in 4k chunks. Through large allocation > sizes we can reduce that management overhead but we can only do this if we > have an effective way of defragmenting memory to get longer contiguous > chunks that can be managed to a single page struct. > > Please make sure that compaction and related measures really work properly. > Local testing still shows them to be behaving as expected but then again, I haven't reproduced the simple problem reported by Chris and James despite using a few different laptops and two different low-end servers. > The patches suggest that the recent modifications are not improving the > situation. > -- Mel Gorman SUSE Labs -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>