On Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:13:09 -0600 Khalid Aziz <khalid.aziz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am working with a tool that simulates oracle database I/O workload. > This tool (orion to be specific - > <http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e16638/iodesign.htm#autoId24>) allocates hugetlbfs pages using shmget() with SHM_HUGETLB flag. It then does aio into these pages from flash disks using various common block sizes used by database. I am looking at performance with two of the most common block sizes - 1M and 64K. aio performance with these two block sizes plunged after Transparent HugePages was introduced in the kernel. Here are performance numbers: > > pre-THP 2.6.39 3.11-rc5 > 1M read 8384 MB/s 5629 MB/s 6501 MB/s > 64K read 7867 MB/s 4576 MB/s 4251 MB/s > > I have narrowed the performance impact down to the overheads introduced > by THP in __get_page_tail() and put_compound_page() routines. perf top > shows >40% of cycles being spent in these two routines. Every time > direct I/O to hugetlbfs pages starts, kernel calls get_page() to grab a > reference to the pages and calls put_page() when I/O completes to put > the reference away. THP introduced significant amount of locking > overhead to get_page() and put_page() when dealing with compound pages > because hugepages can be split underneath get_page() and put_page(). It > added this overhead irrespective of whether it is dealing with hugetlbfs > pages or transparent hugepages. This resulted in 20%-45% drop in aio > performance when using hugetlbfs pages. > > Since hugetlbfs pages can not be split, there is no reason to go through > all the locking overhead for these pages from what I can see. I added > code to __get_page_tail() and put_compound_page() to bypass all the > locking code when working with hugetlbfs pages. This improved > performance significantly. Performance numbers with this patch: > > pre-THP 3.11-rc5 3.11-rc5 + Patch > 1M read 8384 MB/s 6501 MB/s 8371 MB/s > 64K read 7867 MB/s 4251 MB/s 6510 MB/s > > Performance with 64K read is still lower than what it was before THP, > but still a 53% improvement. It does mean there is more work to be done > but I will take a 53% improvement for now. > > Please take a look at the following patch and let me know if it looks > reasonable. Pretty convincing. I tagged this for a -stable backport. To allow time for review and testing I'll plan to merge the patch into 3.12-rc1, so it should materialize in 3.11.x (and hopefully earlier) stable kernels after that. To facilitate backporting the patch could have been quite a bit smaller, with some simple restructuring. It applies OK to 3.10, but not 3.9. Hopefully that's good enough... -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html