mm: compaction: allow compaction to isolate dirty pages
commit a77ebd33 upstream. Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. A fix aimed at preserving page aging information by reducing LRU list churning had the side-effect of reducing THP allocation success rates. This was part of a series to restore the success rates while preserving the reclaim fix. Short summary: There are severe stalls when a USB stick using VFAT is used with THP enabled that are reduced by this series. If you are experiencing this problem, please test and report back and considering I have seen complaints from openSUSE and Fedora users on this as well as a few private mails, I'm guessing it's a widespread issue. This is a new type of USB-related stall because it is due to synchronous compaction writing where as in the past the big problem was dirty pages reaching the end of the LRU and being written by reclaim. Am cc'ing Andrew this time and this series would replace mm-do-not-stall-in-synchronous-compaction-for-thp-allocations.patch. I'm also cc'ing Dave Jones as he might have merged that patch to Fedora for wider testing and ideally it would be reverted and replaced by this series. That said, the later patches could really do with some review. If this series is not the answer then a new direction needs to be discussed because as it is, the stalls are unacceptable as the results in this leader show. For testers that try backporting this to 3.1, it won't work because there is a non-obvious dependency on not writing back pages in direct reclaim so you need those patches too. Changelog since V5 o Rebase to 3.2-rc5 o Tidy up the changelogs a bit Changelog since V4 o Added reviewed-bys, credited Andrea properly for sync-light o Allow dirty pages without mappings to be considered for migration o Bound the number of pages freed for compaction o Isolate PageReclaim pages on their own LRU list This is against 3.2-rc5 and follows on from discussions on "mm: Do not stall in synchronous compaction for THP allocations" and "[RFC PATCH 0/5] Reduce compaction-related stalls". Initially, the proposed patch eliminated stalls due to compaction which sometimes resulted in user-visible interactivity problems on browsers by simply never using sync compaction. The downside was that THP success allocation rates were lower because dirty pages were not being migrated as reported by Andrea. His approach at fixing this was nacked on the grounds that it reverted fixes from Rik merged that reduced the amount of pages reclaimed as it severely impacted his workloads performance. This series attempts to reconcile the requirements of maximising THP usage, without stalling in a user-visible fashion due to compaction or cheating by reclaiming an excessive number of pages. Patch 1 partially reverts commit 39deaf85 to allow migration to isolate dirty pages. This is because migration can move some dirty pages without blocking. Patch 2 notes that the /proc/sys/vm/compact_memory handler is not using synchronous compaction when it should be. This is unrelated to the reported stalls but is worth fixing. Patch 3 checks if we isolated a compound page during lumpy scan and account for it properly. For the most part, this affects tracing so it's unrelated to the stalls but worth fixing. Patch 4 notes that it is possible to abort reclaim early for compaction and return 0 to the page allocator potentially entering the "may oom" path. This has not been observed in practice but the rest of the series potentially makes it easier to happen. Patch 5 adds a sync parameter to the migratepage callback and gives the callback responsibility for migrating the page without blocking if sync==false. For example, fallback_migrate_page will not call writepage if sync==false. This increases the number of pages that can be handled by asynchronous compaction thereby reducing stalls. Patch 6 restores filter-awareness to isolate_lru_page for migration. In practice, it means that pages under writeback and pages without a ->migratepage callback will not be isolated for migration. Patch 7 avoids calling direct reclaim if compaction is deferred but makes sure that compaction is only deferred if sync compaction was used. Patch 8 introduces a sync-light migration mechanism that sync compaction uses. The objective is to allow some stalls but to not call ->writepage which can lead to significant user-visible stalls. Patch 9 notes that while we want to abort reclaim ASAP to allow compation to go ahead that we leave a very small window of opportunity for compaction to run. This patch allows more pages to be freed by reclaim but bounds the number to a reasonable level based on the high watermark on each zone. Patch 10 allows slabs to be shrunk even after compaction_ready() is true for one zone. This is to avoid a problem whereby a single small zone can abort reclaim even though no pages have been reclaimed and no suitably large zone is in a usable state. Patch 11 fixes a problem with the rate of page scanning. As reclaim is rarely stalling on pages under writeback it means that scan rates are very high. This is particularly true for direct reclaim which is not calling writepage. The vmstat figures implied that much of this was busy work with PageReclaim pages marked for immediate reclaim. This patch is a prototype that moves these pages to their own LRU list. This has been tested and other than 2 USB keys getting trashed, nothing horrible fell out. That said, I am a bit unhappy with the rescue logic in patch 11 but did not find a better way around it. It does significantly reduce scan rates and System CPU time indicating it is the right direction to take. What is of critical importance is that stalls due to compaction are massively reduced even though sync compaction was still allowed. Testing from people complaining about stalls copying to USBs with THP enabled are particularly welcome. The following tests all involve THP usage and USB keys in some way. Each test follows this type of pattern 1. Read from some fast fast storage, be it raw device or file. Each time the copy finishes, start again until the test ends 2. Write a large file to a filesystem on a USB stick. Each time the copy finishes, start again until the test ends 3. When memory is low, start an alloc process that creates a mapping the size of physical memory to stress THP allocation. This is the "real" part of the test and the part that is meant to trigger stalls when THP is enabled. Copying continues in the background. 4. Record the CPU usage and time to execute of the alloc process 5. Record the number of THP allocs and fallbacks as well as the number of THP pages in use a the end of the test just before alloc exited 6. Run the test 5 times to get an idea of variability 7. Between each run, sync is run and caches dropped and the test waits until nr_dirty is a small number to avoid interference or caching between iterations that would skew the figures. The individual tests were then writebackCPDeviceBasevfat Disable THP, read from a raw device (sda), vfat on USB stick writebackCPDeviceBaseext4 Disable THP, read from a raw device (sda), ext4 on USB stick writebackCPDevicevfat THP enabled, read from a raw device (sda), vfat on USB stick writebackCPDeviceext4 THP enabled, read from a raw device (sda), ext4 on USB stick writebackCPFilevfat THP enabled, read from a file on fast storage and USB, both vfat writebackCPFileext4 THP enabled, read from a file on fast storage and USB, both ext4 The kernels tested were 3.1 3.1 vanilla 3.2-rc5 freemore Patches 1-10 immediate Patches 1-11 andrea The 8 patches Andrea posted as a basis of comparison The results are very long unfortunately. I'll start with the case where we are not using THP at all writebackCPDeviceBasevfat 3.1.0-vanilla rc5-vanilla freemore-v6r1 isolate-v6r1 andrea-v2r1 System Time 1.28 ( 0.00%) 54.49 (-4143.46%) 48.63 (-3687.69%) 4.69 ( -265.11%) 51.88 (-3940.81%) +/- 0.06 ( 0.00%) 2.45 (-4305.55%) 4.75 (-8430.57%) 7.46 (-13282.76%) 4.76 (-8440.70%) User Time 0.09 ( 0.00%) 0.05 ( 40.91%) 0.06 ( 29.55%) 0.07 ( 15.91%) 0.06 ( 27.27%) +/- 0.02 ( 0.00%) 0.01 ( 45.39%) 0.02 ( 25.07%) 0.00 ( 77.06%) 0.01 ( 52.24%) Elapsed Time 110.27 ( 0.00%) 56.38 ( 48.87%) 49.95 ( 54.70%) 11.77 ( 89.33%) 53.43 ( 51.54%) +/- 7.33 ( 0.00%) 3.77 ( 48.61%) 4.94 ( 32.63%) 6.71 ( 8.50%) 4.76 ( 35.03%) THP Active 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) +/- 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) Fault Alloc 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) +/- 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) Fault Fallback 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) +/- 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) The THP figures are obviously all 0 because THP was enabled. The main thing to watch is the elapsed times and how they compare to times when THP is enabled later. It's also important to note that elapsed time is improved by this series as System CPu time is much reduced. writebackCPDevicevfat 3.1.0-vanilla rc5-vanilla freemore-v6r1 isolate-v6r1 andrea-v2r1 System Time 1.22 ( 0.00%) 13.89 (-1040.72%) 46.40 (-3709.20%) 4.44 ( -264.37%) 47.37 (-3789.33%) +/- 0.06 ( 0.00%) 22.82 (-37635.56%) 3.84 (-6249.44%) 6.48 (-10618.92%) 6.60 (-10818.53%) User Time 0.06 ( 0.00%) 0.06 ( -6.90%) 0.05 ( 17.24%) 0.05 ( 13.79%) 0.04 ( 31.03%) +/- 0.01 ( 0.00%) 0.01 ( 33.33%) 0.01 ( 33.33%) 0.01 ( 39.14%) 0.01 ( 25.46%) Elapsed Time 10445.54 ( 0.00%) 2249.92 ( 78.46%) 70.06 ( 99.33%) 16.59 ( 99.84%) 472.43 ( 95.48%) +/- 643.98 ( 0.00%) 811.62 ( -26.03%) 10.02 ( 98.44%) 7.03 ( 98.91%) 59.99 ( 90.68%) THP Active 15.60 ( 0.00%) 35.20 ( 225.64%) 65.00 ( 416.67%) 70.80 ( 453.85%) 62.20 ( 398.72%) +/- 18.48 ( 0.00%) 51.29 ( 277.59%) 15.99 ( 86.52%) 37.91 ( 205.18%) 22.02 ( 119.18%) Fault Alloc 121.80 ( 0.00%) 76.60 ( 62.89%) 155.40 ( 127.59%) 181.20 ( 148.77%) 286.60 ( 235.30%) +/- 73.51 ( 0.00%) 61.11 ( 83.12%) 34.89 ( 47.46%) 31.88 ( 43.36%) 68.13 ( 92.68%) Fault Fallback 881.20 ( 0.00%) 926.60 ( -5.15%) 847.60 ( 3.81%) 822.00 ( 6.72%) 716.60 ( 18.68%) +/- 73.51 ( 0.00%) 61.26 ( 16.67%) 34.89 ( 52.54%) 31.65 ( 56.94%) 67.75 ( 7.84%) MMTests Statistics: duration User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 3540.88 1945.37 716.04 64.97 1937.03 Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 52417.33 11425.90 501.02 230.95 2520.28 The first thing to note is the "Elapsed Time" for the vanilla kernels of 2249 seconds versus 56 with THP disabled which might explain the reports of USB stalls with THP enabled. Applying the patches brings performance in line with THP-disabled performance while isolating pages for immediate reclaim from the LRU cuts down System CPU time. The "Fault Alloc" success rate figures are also improved. The vanilla kernel only managed to allocate 76.6 pages on average over the course of 5 iterations where as applying the series allocated 181.20 on average albeit it is well within variance. It's worth noting that applies the series at least descreases the amount of variance which implies an improvement. Andrea's series had a higher success rate for THP allocations but at a severe cost to elapsed time which is still better than vanilla but still much worse than disabling THP altogether. One can bring my series close to Andrea's by removing this check /* * If compaction is deferred for high-order allocations, it is because * sync compaction recently failed. In this is the case and the caller * has requested the system not be heavily disrupted, fail the * allocation now instead of entering direct reclaim */ if (deferred_compaction && (gfp_mask & __GFP_NO_KSWAPD)) goto nopage; I didn't include a patch that removed the above check because hurting overall performance to improve the THP figure is not what the average user wants. It's something to consider though if someone really wants to maximise THP usage no matter what it does to the workload initially. This is summary of vmstat figures from the same test. 3.1.0-vanilla rc5-vanilla freemore-v6r1 isolate-v6r1 andrea-v2r1 Page Ins 3257266139 1111844061 17263623 10901575 161423219 Page Outs 81054922 30364312 3626530 3657687 8753730 Swap Ins 3294 2851 6560 4964 4592 Swap Outs 390073 528094 620197 790912 698285 Direct pages scanned 1077581700 3024951463 1764930052 115140570 5901188831 Kswapd pages scanned 34826043 7112868 2131265 1686942 1893966 Kswapd pages reclaimed 28950067 4911036 1246044 966475 1497726 Direct pages reclaimed 805148398 280167837 3623473 2215044 40809360 Kswapd efficiency 83% 69% 58% 57% 79% Kswapd velocity 664.399 622.521 4253.852 7304.360 751.490 Direct efficiency 74% 9% 0% 1% 0% Direct velocity 20557.737 264745.137 3522673.849 498551.938 2341481.435 Percentage direct scans 96% 99% 99% 98% 99% Page writes by reclaim 722646 529174 620319 791018 699198 Page writes file 332573 1080 122 106 913 Page writes anon 390073 528094 620197 790912 698285 Page reclaim immediate 0 2552514720 1635858848 111281140 5478375032 Page rescued immediate 0 0 0 87848 0 Slabs scanned 23552 23552 9216 8192 9216 Direct inode steals 231 0 0 0 0 Kswapd inode steals 0 0 0 0 0 Kswapd skipped wait 28076 786 0 61 6 THP fault alloc 609 383 753 906 1433 THP collapse alloc 12 6 0 0 6 THP splits 536 211 456 593 1136 THP fault fallback 4406 4633 4263 4110 3583 THP collapse fail 120 127 0 0 4 Compaction stalls 1810 728 623 779 3200 Compaction success 196 53 60 80 123 Compaction failures 1614 675 563 699 3077 Compaction pages moved 193158 53545 243185 333457 226688 Compaction move failure 9952 9396 16424 23676 45070 The main things to look at are 1. Page In/out figures are much reduced by the series. 2. Direct page scanning is incredibly high (264745.137 pages scanned per second on the vanilla kernel) but isolating PageReclaim pages on their own list reduces the number of pages scanned significantly. 3. The fact that "Page rescued immediate" is a positive number implies that we sometimes race removing pages from the LRU_IMMEDIATE list that need to be put back on a normal LRU but it happens only for 0.07% of the pages marked for immediate reclaim. writebackCPDeviceext4 3.1.0-vanilla rc5-vanilla freemore-v6r1 isolate-v6r1 andrea-v2r1 System Time 1.51 ( 0.00%) 1.77 ( -17.66%) 1.46 ( 2.92%) 1.15 ( 23.77%) 1.89 ( -25.63%) +/- 0.27 ( 0.00%) 0.67 ( -148.52%) 0.33 ( -22.76%) 0.30 ( -11.15%) 0.19 ( 30.16%) User Time 0.03 ( 0.00%) 0.04 ( -37.50%) 0.05 ( -62.50%) 0.07 ( -112.50%) 0.04 ( -18.75%) +/- 0.01 ( 0.00%) 0.02 ( -146.64%) 0.02 ( -97.91%) 0.02 ( -75.59%) 0.02 ( -63.30%) Elapsed Time 124.93 ( 0.00%) 114.49 ( 8.36%) 96.77 ( 22.55%) 27.48 ( 78.00%) 205.70 ( -64.65%) +/- 20.20 ( 0.00%) 74.39 ( -268.34%) 59.88 ( -196.48%) 7.72 ( 61.79%) 25.03 ( -23.95%) THP Active 161.80 ( 0.00%) 83.60 ( 51.67%) 141.20 ( 87.27%) 84.60 ( 52.29%) 82.60 ( 51.05%) +/- 71.95 ( 0.00%) 43.80 ( 60.88%) 26.91 ( 37.40%) 59.02 ( 82.03%) 52.13 ( 72.45%) Fault Alloc 471.40 ( 0.00%) 228.60 ( 48.49%) 282.20 ( 59.86%) 225.20 ( 47.77%) 388.40 ( 82.39%) +/- 88.07 ( 0.00%) 87.42 ( 99.26%) 73.79 ( 83.78%) 109.62 ( 124.47%) 82.62 ( 93.81%) Fault Fallback 531.60 ( 0.00%) 774.60 ( -45.71%) 720.80 ( -35.59%) 777.80 ( -46.31%) 614.80 ( -15.65%) +/- 88.07 ( 0.00%) 87.26 ( 0.92%) 73.79 ( 16.22%) 109.62 ( -24.47%) 82.29 ( 6.56%) MMTests Statistics: duration User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 50.22 33.76 30.65 24.14 128.45 Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 1113.73 1132.19 1029.45 759.49 1707.26 Similar test but the USB stick is using ext4 instead of vfat. As ext4 does not use writepage for migration, the large stalls due to compaction when THP is enabled are not observed. Still, isolating PageReclaim pages on their own list helped completion time largely by reducing the number of pages scanned by direct reclaim although time spend in congestion_wait could also be a factor. Again, Andrea's series had far higher success rates for THP allocation at the cost of elapsed time. I didn't look too closely but a quick look at the vmstat figures tells me kswapd reclaimed 8 times more pages than the patch series and direct reclaim reclaimed roughly three times as many pages. It follows that if memory is aggressively reclaimed, there will be more available for THP. writebackCPFilevfat 3.1.0-vanilla rc5-vanilla freemore-v6r1 isolate-v6r1 andrea-v2r1 System Time 1.76 ( 0.00%) 29.10 (-1555.52%) 46.01 (-2517.18%) 4.79 ( -172.35%) 54.89 (-3022.53%) +/- 0.14 ( 0.00%) 25.61 (-18185.17%) 2.15 (-1434.83%) 6.60 (-4610.03%) 9.75 (-6863.76%) User Time 0.05 ( 0.00%) 0.07 ( -45.83%) 0.05 ( -4.17%) 0.06 ( -29.17%) 0.06 ( -16.67%) +/- 0.02 ( 0.00%) 0.02 ( 20.11%) 0.02 ( -3.14%) 0.01 ( 31.58%) 0.01 ( 47.41%) Elapsed Time 22520.79 ( 0.00%) 1082.85 ( 95.19%) 73.30 ( 99.67%) 32.43 ( 99.86%) 291.84 ( 98.70%) +/- 7277.23 ( 0.00%) 706.29 ( 90.29%) 19.05 ( 99.74%) 17.05 ( 99.77%) 125.55 ( 98.27%) THP Active 83.80 ( 0.00%) 12.80 ( 15.27%) 15.60 ( 18.62%) 13.00 ( 15.51%) 0.80 ( 0.95%) +/- 66.81 ( 0.00%) 20.19 ( 30.22%) 5.92 ( 8.86%) 15.06 ( 22.54%) 1.17 ( 1.75%) Fault Alloc 171.00 ( 0.00%) 67.80 ( 39.65%) 97.40 ( 56.96%) 125.60 ( 73.45%) 133.00 ( 77.78%) +/- 82.91 ( 0.00%) 30.69 ( 37.02%) 53.91 ( 65.02%) 55.05 ( 66.40%) 21.19 ( 25.56%) Fault Fallback 832.00 ( 0.00%) 935.20 ( -12.40%) 906.00 ( -8.89%) 877.40 ( -5.46%) 870.20 ( -4.59%) +/- 82.91 ( 0.00%) 30.69 ( 62.98%) 54.01 ( 34.86%) 55.05 ( 33.60%) 20.91 ( 74.78%) MMTests Statistics: duration User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 7229.81 928.42 704.52 80.68 1330.76 Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 112849.04 5618.69 571.11 360.54 1664.28 In this case, the test is reading/writing only from filesystems but as it's vfat, it's slow due to calling writepage during compaction. Little to observe really - the time to complete the test goes way down with the series applied and THP allocation success rates go up in comparison to 3.2-rc5. The success rates are lower than 3.1.0 but the elapsed time for that kernel is abysmal so it is not really a sensible comparison. As before, Andrea's series allocates more THPs at the cost of overall performance. writebackCPFileext4 3.1.0-vanilla rc5-vanilla freemore-v6r1 isolate-v6r1 andrea-v2r1 System Time 1.51 ( 0.00%) 1.77 ( -17.66%) 1.46 ( 2.92%) 1.15 ( 23.77%) 1.89 ( -25.63%) +/- 0.27 ( 0.00%) 0.67 ( -148.52%) 0.33 ( -22.76%) 0.30 ( -11.15%) 0.19 ( 30.16%) User Time 0.03 ( 0.00%) 0.04 ( -37.50%) 0.05 ( -62.50%) 0.07 ( -112.50%) 0.04 ( -18.75%) +/- 0.01 ( 0.00%) 0.02 ( -146.64%) 0.02 ( -97.91%) 0.02 ( -75.59%) 0.02 ( -63.30%) Elapsed Time 124.93 ( 0.00%) 114.49 ( 8.36%) 96.77 ( 22.55%) 27.48 ( 78.00%) 205.70 ( -64.65%) +/- 20.20 ( 0.00%) 74.39 ( -268.34%) 59.88 ( -196.48%) 7.72 ( 61.79%) 25.03 ( -23.95%) THP Active 161.80 ( 0.00%) 83.60 ( 51.67%) 141.20 ( 87.27%) 84.60 ( 52.29%) 82.60 ( 51.05%) +/- 71.95 ( 0.00%) 43.80 ( 60.88%) 26.91 ( 37.40%) 59.02 ( 82.03%) 52.13 ( 72.45%) Fault Alloc 471.40 ( 0.00%) 228.60 ( 48.49%) 282.20 ( 59.86%) 225.20 ( 47.77%) 388.40 ( 82.39%) +/- 88.07 ( 0.00%) 87.42 ( 99.26%) 73.79 ( 83.78%) 109.62 ( 124.47%) 82.62 ( 93.81%) Fault Fallback 531.60 ( 0.00%) 774.60 ( -45.71%) 720.80 ( -35.59%) 777.80 ( -46.31%) 614.80 ( -15.65%) +/- 88.07 ( 0.00%) 87.26 ( 0.92%) 73.79 ( 16.22%) 109.62 ( -24.47%) 82.29 ( 6.56%) MMTests Statistics: duration User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 50.22 33.76 30.65 24.14 128.45 Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 1113.73 1132.19 1029.45 759.49 1707.26 Same type of story - elapsed times go down. In this case, allocation success rates are roughtly the same. As before, Andrea's has higher success rates but takes a lot longer. Overall the series does reduce latencies and while the tests are inherency racy as alloc competes with the cp processes, the variability was included. The THP allocation rates are not as high as they could be but that is because we would have to be more aggressive about reclaim and compaction impacting overall performance. This patch: Commit 39deaf85 ("mm: compaction: make isolate_lru_page() filter-aware") noted that compaction does not migrate dirty or writeback pages and that is was meaningless to pick the page and re-add it to the LRU list. What was missed during review is that asynchronous migration moves dirty pages if their ->migratepage callback is migrate_page() because these can be moved without blocking. This potentially impacted hugepage allocation success rates by a factor depending on how many dirty pages are in the system. This patch partially reverts 39deaf85 to allow migration to isolate dirty pages again. This increases how much compaction disrupts the LRU but that is addressed later in the series. Signed-off-by:Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Reviewed-by:
Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Reviewed-by:
Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by:
Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Andy Isaacson <adi@hexapodia.org> Cc: Nai Xia <nai.xia@gmail.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment