Re: [patch 04/11] mm: memcg: per-priority per-zone hierarchy scangenerations

From: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Date: Tue Sep 13 2011 - 20:56:06 EST


On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:03:01 +0200
Johannes Weiner <jweiner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 07:27:59PM +0900, KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki wrote:
> > On Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:57:21 +0200
> > Johannes Weiner <jweiner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > Memory cgroup limit reclaim currently picks one memory cgroup out of
> > > the target hierarchy, remembers it as the last scanned child, and
> > > reclaims all zones in it with decreasing priority levels.
> > >
> > > The new hierarchy reclaim code will pick memory cgroups from the same
> > > hierarchy concurrently from different zones and priority levels, it
> > > becomes necessary that hierarchy roots not only remember the last
> > > scanned child, but do so for each zone and priority level.
> > >
> > > Furthermore, detecting full hierarchy round-trips reliably will become
> > > crucial, so instead of counting on one iterator site seeing a certain
> > > memory cgroup twice, use a generation counter that is increased every
> > > time the child with the highest ID has been visited.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > I cannot image how this works. could you illustrate more with easy example ?
>
> Previously, we did
>
> mem = mem_cgroup_iter(root)
> for each priority level:
> for each zone in zonelist:
>
> and this would reclaim memcg-1-zone-1, memcg-1-zone-2, memcg-1-zone-3
> etc.
>
yes.

> The new code does
>
> for each priority level
> for each zone in zonelist
> mem = mem_cgroup_iter(root)
>
> but with a single last_scanned_child per memcg, this would scan
> memcg-1-zone-1, memcg-2-zone-2, memcg-3-zone-3 etc, which does not
> make much sense.
>
> Now imagine two reclaimers. With the old code, the first reclaimer
> would pick memcg-1 and scan all its zones, the second reclaimer would
> pick memcg-2 and reclaim all its zones. Without this patch, the first
> reclaimer would pick memcg-1 and scan zone-1, the second reclaimer
> would pick memcg-2 and scan zone-1, then the first reclaimer would
> pick memcg-3 and scan zone-2. If the reclaimers are concurrently
> scanning at different priority levels, things are even worse because
> one reclaimer may put much more force on the memcgs it gets from
> mem_cgroup_iter() than the other reclaimer. They must not share the
> same iterator.
>
> The generations are needed because the old algorithm did not rely too
> much on detecting full round-trips. After every reclaim cycle, it
> checked the limit and broke out of the loop if enough was reclaimed,
> no matter how many children were reclaimed from. The new algorithm is
> used for global reclaim, where the only exit condition of the
> hierarchy reclaim is the full roundtrip, because equal pressure needs
> to be applied to all zones.
>
Hm, ok, maybe good for global reclam.
Is this used for both of reclaim-by-limit and global-reclaim ?
If so, I need to abandon node-selection-logic for reclaim-by-limit
and nodemask-for-memcg which shows me very good result.
I'll be sad ;)

Thanks,
-Kame



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