Re: [RFC] memory cgroup: my thoughts on memsw

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(2014/09/06 1:00), Vladimir Davydov wrote:
On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 11:20:43PM +0900, Kamezawa Hiroyuki wrote:
Basically, I don't like OOM Kill. Anyone don't like it, I think.

In recent container use, application may be build as "stateless" and
kill-and-respawn may not be problematic, but I think killing "a" process
by oom-kill is too naive.

If your proposal is triggering notification to user space at hitting
anon+swap limit, it may be useful.
...Some container-cluster management software can handle it.
For example, container may be restarted.

Memcg has threshold notifier and vmpressure notifier.
I think you can enhance it.
[...]
My point is that "killing a process" tend not to be able to fix the situation.
For example, fork-bomb by "make -j" cannot be handled by it.

So, I don't want to think about enhancing OOM-Kill. Please think of better
way to survive. With the help of countainer-management-softwares, I think
we can have several choices.

Restart contantainer (killall) may be the best if container app is stateless.
Or container-management can provide some failover.

The problem I'm trying to set out is not about OOM actually (sorry if
the way I explain is confusing). We could probably configure OOM to kill
a whole cgroup (not just a process) and/or improve user-notification so
that the userspace could react somehow. I'm sure it must and will be
discussed one day.

The problem is that *before* invoking OOM on *global* pressure we're
trying to reclaim containers' memory and if there's progress we won't
invoke OOM. This can result in a huge slow down of the whole system (due
to swap out).

use SSD or zram for swap device.


The 1st reason we added memsw.limit was for avoiding that the whole swap
is used up by a cgroup where memory-leak of forkbomb running and not for
some intellegent controls.

 From your opinion, I feel what you want is avoiding charging against page-caches.
But thiking docker at el, page-cache is not shared between containers any more.
I think "including cache" makes sense.

Not exactly. It's not about sharing caches among containers. The point
is (1) it's difficult to estimate the size of file caches that will max
out the performance of a container, and (2) a typical workload will
perform better and put less pressure on disk if it has more caches.

Now imagine a big host running a small number of containers and
therefore having a lot of free memory most of time, but still
experiencing load spikes once an hour/day/whatever when memory usage
raises up drastically. It'd be unwise to set hard limits for those
containers that are running regularly, because they'd probably perform
much better if they had more file caches. So the admin decides to use
soft limits instead. He is forced to use memsw.limit > the soft limit,
but this is unsafe, because the container may eat anon memory up to
memsw.limit then, and anon memory isn't easy to get rid of when it comes
to the global pressure. If the admin had a mean to limit swappable
memory, he could avoid it. This is what I was trying to illustrate by
the example in the first e-mail of this thread.

Note if there were no soft limits, the current setup would be just fine,
otherwise it fails. And soft limits are proved to be useful AFAIK.

As you noticed, hitting anon+swap limit just means oom-kill.
My point is that using oom-killer for "server management" just seems crazy.

Let my clarify things. your proposal was.
 1. soft-limit will be a main feature for server management.
 2. Because of soft-limit, global memory reclaim runs.
 3. Using swap at global memory reclaim can cause poor performance.
 4. So, making use of OOM-Killer for avoiding swap.

I can't agree "4". I think

 - don't configure swap.
 - use zram
 - use SSD for swap
Or
 - provide a way to notify usage of "anon+swap" to container management software.

   Now we have "vmpressure". Container management software can kill or respawn container
   with using user-defined policy for avoidng swap.

   If you don't want to run kswapd at all, threshold notifier enhancement may be required.

/proc/meminfo provides total number of ANON/CACHE pages.
Many things can be done in userland.

And your idea can't help swap-out caused by memory pressure comes from "zones".
I guess vmpressure will be a total win. The kernel may need some enhancement
but I don't like to make use of oom-killer as a part of feature for avoiding swap.

Thanks,
-Kame







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