How can we make page replacement smarter (was: swap-prefetch)

[Al Boldi]

Chris Snook wrote:
> Resource size has been outpacing processing latency since the dawn of
> time. Disks get bigger much faster than seek times shrink.  Main memory
> and cache keep growing, while single-threaded processing speed has nearly
> ground to a halt.
>
> In the old days, it made lots of sense to manage resource allocation in
> pages and blocks.  In the past few years, we started reserving blocks in
> ext3 automatically because it saves more in seek time than it costs in
> disk space. Now we're taking preallocation and antifragmentation to the
> next level with extent-based allocation in ext4.
>
> Well, we're still using bitmap-style allocation for pages, and the
> prefetch-less swap mechanism adheres to this design as well.  Maybe it's
> time to start thinking about memory in a somewhat more extent-like
> fashion.
>
> With swap prefetch, we're only optimizing the case when the box isn't
> loaded and there's RAM free, but we're not optimizing the case when the
> box is heavily loaded and we need for RAM to be free.  This is a complete
> reversal of sane development priorities.  If swap batching is an
> optimization at all (and we have empirical evidence that it is) then it
> should also be an optimization to swap out chunks of pages when we need to
> free memory.
>
> So, how do we go about this grouping?  I suggest that if we keep per-VMA
> reference/fault/dirty statistics, we can tell which logically distinct
> chunks of memory are being regularly used.  This would also us to apply
> different page replacement policies to chunks of memory that are being
> used in different fashions.
>
> With such statistics, we could then page out VMAs in 2MB chunks when we're
> under memory pressure, also giving us the option of transparently paging
> them back in to hugepages when we have the memory free, once anonymous
> hugepage support is in place.
>
> I'm inclined to view swap prefetch as a successful scientific experiment,
> and use that data to inform a more reasoned engineering effort.  If we can
> design something intelligent which happens to behave more or less like
> swap prefetch does under the circumstances where swap prefetch helps, and
> does something else smart under the circumstances where swap prefetch
> makes no discernable difference, it'll be a much bigger improvement.
>
> Because we cannot prove why the existing patch helps, we cannot say what
> impact it will have when things like virtualization and solid state drives
> radically change the coefficients of the equation we have not solved. 
> Providing a sysctl to turn off a misbehaving feature is a poor substitute
> for doing it right the first time, and leaving it off by default will
> ensure that it only gets used by the handful of people who know enough to
> rebuild with the patch anyway.
>
> Let's talk about how we can make page replacement smarter, so it naturally
> accomplishes what swap prefetch accomplishes, as part of a design we can
> reason about.
>
> CC-ing linux-mm, since that's where I think we should take this next.

Good idea, but unless we understand the problems involved, we are bound to 
repeat it.  So my first question would be:  Why is swap-in so slow?

As I have posted in other threads, swap-in of consecutive pages suffers a 2x 
slowdown wrt swap-out, whereas swap-in of random pages suffers over 6x 
slowdown.

Because it is hard to quantify the expected swap-in speed for random pages, 
let's first tackle the swap-in of consecutive pages, which should be at 
least as fast as swap-out.  So again, why is swap-in so slow?

Once we understand this problem, we may be able to suggest a smart 
improvement.


Thanks!

--
Al

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