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authorMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>2011-07-25 17:12:29 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2011-07-25 20:57:10 -0700
commitcd38b115d5ad79b0100ac6daa103c4fe2c50a913 (patch)
treeffa8b05c42d0c53ffdd1dee6ce2570bba1d5db2f /mm
parent1d65f86db14806cf7b1218c7b4ecb8b4db5af27d (diff)
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mm: page allocator: initialise ZLC for first zone eligible for zone_reclaim
There have been a small number of complaints about significant stalls while copying large amounts of data on NUMA machines reported on a distribution bugzilla. In these cases, zone_reclaim was enabled by default due to large NUMA distances. In general, the complaints have not been about the workload itself unless it was a file server (in which case the recommendation was disable zone_reclaim). The stalls are mostly due to significant amounts of time spent scanning the preferred zone for pages to free. After a failure, it might fallback to another node (as zonelists are often node-ordered rather than zone-ordered) but stall quickly again when the next allocation attempt occurs. In bad cases, each page allocated results in a full scan of the preferred zone. Patch 1 checks the preferred zone for recent allocation failure which is particularly important if zone_reclaim has failed recently. This avoids rescanning the zone in the near future and instead falling back to another node. This may hurt node locality in some cases but a failure to zone_reclaim is more expensive than a remote access. Patch 2 clears the zlc information after direct reclaim. Otherwise, zone_reclaim can mark zones full, direct reclaim can reclaim enough pages but the zone is still not considered for allocation. This was tested on a 24-thread 2-node x86_64 machine. The tests were focused on large amounts of IO. All tests were bound to the CPUs on node-0 to avoid disturbances due to processes being scheduled on different nodes. The kernels tested are 3.0-rc6-vanilla Vanilla 3.0-rc6 zlcfirst Patch 1 applied zlcreconsider Patches 1+2 applied FS-Mark ./fs_mark -d /tmp/fsmark-10813 -D 100 -N 5000 -n 208 -L 35 -t 24 -S0 -s 524288 fsmark-3.0-rc6 3.0-rc6 3.0-rc6 vanilla zlcfirs zlcreconsider Files/s min 54.90 ( 0.00%) 49.80 (-10.24%) 49.10 (-11.81%) Files/s mean 100.11 ( 0.00%) 135.17 (25.94%) 146.93 (31.87%) Files/s stddev 57.51 ( 0.00%) 138.97 (58.62%) 158.69 (63.76%) Files/s max 361.10 ( 0.00%) 834.40 (56.72%) 802.40 (55.00%) Overhead min 76704.00 ( 0.00%) 76501.00 ( 0.27%) 77784.00 (-1.39%) Overhead mean 1485356.51 ( 0.00%) 1035797.83 (43.40%) 1594680.26 (-6.86%) Overhead stddev 1848122.53 ( 0.00%) 881489.88 (109.66%) 1772354.90 ( 4.27%) Overhead max 7989060.00 ( 0.00%) 3369118.00 (137.13%) 10135324.00 (-21.18%) MMTests Statistics: duration User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 501.49 493.91 499.93 Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 2451.57 2257.48 2215.92 MMTests Statistics: vmstat Page Ins 46268 63840 66008 Page Outs 90821596 90671128 88043732 Swap Ins 0 0 0 Swap Outs 0 0 0 Direct pages scanned 13091697 8966863 8971790 Kswapd pages scanned 0 1830011 1831116 Kswapd pages reclaimed 0 1829068 1829930 Direct pages reclaimed 13037777 8956828 8648314 Kswapd efficiency 100% 99% 99% Kswapd velocity 0.000 810.643 826.346 Direct efficiency 99% 99% 96% Direct velocity 5340.128 3972.068 4048.788 Percentage direct scans 100% 83% 83% Page writes by reclaim 0 3 0 Slabs scanned 796672 720640 720256 Direct inode steals 7422667 7160012 7088638 Kswapd inode steals 0 1736840 2021238 Test completes far faster with a large increase in the number of files created per second. Standard deviation is high as a small number of iterations were much higher than the mean. The number of pages scanned by zone_reclaim is reduced and kswapd is used for more work. LARGE DD 3.0-rc6 3.0-rc6 3.0-rc6 vanilla zlcfirst zlcreconsider download tar 59 ( 0.00%) 59 ( 0.00%) 55 ( 7.27%) dd source files 527 ( 0.00%) 296 (78.04%) 320 (64.69%) delete source 36 ( 0.00%) 19 (89.47%) 20 (80.00%) MMTests Statistics: duration User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 125.03 118.98 122.01 Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 624.56 375.02 398.06 MMTests Statistics: vmstat Page Ins 3594216 439368 407032 Page Outs 23380832 23380488 23377444 Swap Ins 0 0 0 Swap Outs 0 436 287 Direct pages scanned 17482342 69315973 82864918 Kswapd pages scanned 0 519123 575425 Kswapd pages reclaimed 0 466501 522487 Direct pages reclaimed 5858054 2732949 2712547 Kswapd efficiency 100% 89% 90% Kswapd velocity 0.000 1384.254 1445.574 Direct efficiency 33% 3% 3% Direct velocity 27991.453 184832.737 208171.929 Percentage direct scans 100% 99% 99% Page writes by reclaim 0 5082 13917 Slabs scanned 17280 29952 35328 Direct inode steals 115257 1431122 332201 Kswapd inode steals 0 0 979532 This test downloads a large tarfile and copies it with dd a number of times - similar to the most recent bug report I've dealt with. Time to completion is reduced. The number of pages scanned directly is still disturbingly high with a low efficiency but this is likely due to the number of dirty pages encountered. The figures could probably be improved with more work around how kswapd is used and how dirty pages are handled but that is separate work and this result is significant on its own. Streaming Mapped Writer MMTests Statistics: duration User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 124.47 111.67 112.64 Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 2138.14 1816.30 1867.56 MMTests Statistics: vmstat Page Ins 90760 89124 89516 Page Outs 121028340 120199524 120736696 Swap Ins 0 86 55 Swap Outs 0 0 0 Direct pages scanned 114989363 96461439 96330619 Kswapd pages scanned 56430948 56965763 57075875 Kswapd pages reclaimed 27743219 27752044 27766606 Direct pages reclaimed 49777 46884 36655 Kswapd efficiency 49% 48% 48% Kswapd velocity 26392.541 31363.631 30561.736 Direct efficiency 0% 0% 0% Direct velocity 53780.091 53108.759 51581.004 Percentage direct scans 67% 62% 62% Page writes by reclaim 385 122 1513 Slabs scanned 43008 39040 42112 Direct inode steals 0 10 8 Kswapd inode steals 733 534 477 This test just creates a large file mapping and writes to it linearly. Time to completion is again reduced. The gains are mostly down to two things. In many cases, there is less scanning as zone_reclaim simply gives up faster due to recent failures. The second reason is that memory is used more efficiently. Instead of scanning the preferred zone every time, the allocator falls back to another zone and uses it instead improving overall memory utilisation. This patch: initialise ZLC for first zone eligible for zone_reclaim. The zonelist cache (ZLC) is used among other things to record if zone_reclaim() failed for a particular zone recently. The intention is to avoid a high cost scanning extremely long zonelists or scanning within the zone uselessly. Currently the zonelist cache is setup only after the first zone has been considered and zone_reclaim() has been called. The objective was to avoid a costly setup but zone_reclaim is itself quite expensive. If it is failing regularly such as the first eligible zone having mostly mapped pages, the cost in scanning and allocation stalls is far higher than the ZLC initialisation step. This patch initialises ZLC before the first eligible zone calls zone_reclaim(). Once initialised, it is checked whether the zone failed zone_reclaim recently. If it has, the zone is skipped. As the first zone is now being checked, additional care has to be taken about zones marked full. A zone can be marked "full" because it should not have enough unmapped pages for zone_reclaim but this is excessive as direct reclaim or kswapd may succeed where zone_reclaim fails. Only mark zones "full" after zone_reclaim fails if it failed to reclaim enough pages after scanning. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm')
-rw-r--r--mm/page_alloc.c35
1 files changed, 22 insertions, 13 deletions
diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 9119faae6e6..830a465958d 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -1664,7 +1664,7 @@ zonelist_scan:
continue;
if ((alloc_flags & ALLOC_CPUSET) &&
!cpuset_zone_allowed_softwall(zone, gfp_mask))
- goto try_next_zone;
+ continue;
BUILD_BUG_ON(ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS < NR_WMARK);
if (!(alloc_flags & ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS)) {
@@ -1676,17 +1676,36 @@ zonelist_scan:
classzone_idx, alloc_flags))
goto try_this_zone;
+ if (NUMA_BUILD && !did_zlc_setup && nr_online_nodes > 1) {
+ /*
+ * we do zlc_setup if there are multiple nodes
+ * and before considering the first zone allowed
+ * by the cpuset.
+ */
+ allowednodes = zlc_setup(zonelist, alloc_flags);
+ zlc_active = 1;
+ did_zlc_setup = 1;
+ }
+
if (zone_reclaim_mode == 0)
goto this_zone_full;
+ /*
+ * As we may have just activated ZLC, check if the first
+ * eligible zone has failed zone_reclaim recently.
+ */
+ if (NUMA_BUILD && zlc_active &&
+ !zlc_zone_worth_trying(zonelist, z, allowednodes))
+ continue;
+
ret = zone_reclaim(zone, gfp_mask, order);
switch (ret) {
case ZONE_RECLAIM_NOSCAN:
/* did not scan */
- goto try_next_zone;
+ continue;
case ZONE_RECLAIM_FULL:
/* scanned but unreclaimable */
- goto this_zone_full;
+ continue;
default:
/* did we reclaim enough */
if (!zone_watermark_ok(zone, order, mark,
@@ -1703,16 +1722,6 @@ try_this_zone:
this_zone_full:
if (NUMA_BUILD)
zlc_mark_zone_full(zonelist, z);
-try_next_zone:
- if (NUMA_BUILD && !did_zlc_setup && nr_online_nodes > 1) {
- /*
- * we do zlc_setup after the first zone is tried but only
- * if there are multiple nodes make it worthwhile
- */
- allowednodes = zlc_setup(zonelist, alloc_flags);
- zlc_active = 1;
- did_zlc_setup = 1;
- }
}
if (unlikely(NUMA_BUILD && page == NULL && zlc_active)) {