From: Dave Chinner <dchinner@xxxxxxxxxx> When a shrinker returns -1 to shrink_slab() to indicate it cannot do any work given the current memory reclaim requirements, it adds the entire total_scan count to shrinker->nr. The idea ehind this is that whenteh shrinker is next called and can do work, it will do the work of the previously aborted shrinker call as well. However, if a filesystem is doing lots of allocation with GFP_NOFS set, then we get many, many more aborts from the shrinkers than we do successful calls. The result is that shrinker->nr winds up to it's maximum permissible value (twice the current cache size) and then when the next shrinker call that can do work is issued, it has enough scan count built up to free the entire cache twice over. This manifests itself in the cache going from full to empty in a matter of seconds, even when only a small part of the cache is needed to be emptied to free sufficient memory. Under metadata intensive workloads on ext4 and XFS, I'm seeing the VFS caches increase memory consumption up to 75% of memory (no page cache pressure) over a period of 30-60s, and then the shrinker empties them down to zero in the space of 2-3s. This cycle repeats over and over again, with the shrinker completely trashing the Ñnode and dentry caches every minute or so the workload continues. This behaviour was made obvious by the shrink_slab tracepoints added earlier in the series, and made worse by the patch that corrected the concurrent accounting of shrinker->nr. To avoid this problem, stop repeated small increments of the total scan value from winding shrinker->nr up to a value that can cause the entire cache to be freed. We still need to allow it to wind up, so use the delta as the "large scan" threshold check - if the delta is more than a quarter of the entire cache size, then it is a large scan and allowed to cause lots of windup because we are clearly needing to free lots of memory. If it isn't a large scan then limit the total scan to half the size of the cache so that windup never increases to consume the whole cache. Reducing the total scan limit further does not allow enough wind-up to maintain the current levels of performance, whilst a higher threshold does not prevent the windup from freeing the entire cache under sustained workloads. Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@xxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/vmscan.c | 14 ++++++++++++++ 1 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c index dce2767..3688f47 100644 --- a/mm/vmscan.c +++ b/mm/vmscan.c @@ -277,6 +277,20 @@ unsigned long shrink_slab(struct shrink_control *shrink, } /* + * Avoid excessive windup on fielsystem shrinkers due to large + * numbers of GFP_NOFS allocations causing the shrinkers to + * return -1 all the time. This results in a large nr being + * built up so when a shrink that can do some work comes along + * it empties the entire cache due to nr >>> max_pass. This is + * bad for sustaining a working set in memory. + * + * Hence only allow nr to go large when a large delta is + * calculated. + */ + if (delta < max_pass / 4) + total_scan = min(total_scan, max_pass / 2); + + /* * Avoid risking looping forever due to too large nr value: * never try to free more than twice the estimate number of * freeable entries. -- 1.7.5.1 -- 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>