[PATCH 0/8] Reduce system disruption due to kswapd followup V3

[Mel Gorman]

tldr; Overall the system is getting less kicked in the face. Scan rates
	between zones is often more balanced than it used to be. There are
	now fewer writes from reclaim context and a reduction in IO wait
	times.

This series replaces all of the previous follow-up series. It was clear
that more of the stall logic needed to be in the same place so it is
comprehensible and easier to predict.

Changelog since V2
o Consolidate stall decisions into one place
o Add is_dirty_writeback for NFS
o Move accounting around

Further testing of the "Reduce system disruption due to kswapd" discovered
a few problems. First and foremost, it's possible for pages under writeback
to be freed which will lead to badness. Second, as pages were not being
swapped the file LRU was being scanned faster and clean file pages were
being reclaimed. In some cases this results in increased read IO to re-read
data from disk.  Third, more pages were being written from kswapd context
which can adversly affect IO performance. Lastly, it was observed that
PageDirty pages are not necessarily dirty on all filesystems (buffers can be
clean while PageDirty is set and ->writepage generates no IO) and not all
filesystems set PageWriteback when the page is being written (e.g. ext3).
This disconnect confuses the reclaim stalling logic. This follow-up series
is aimed at these problems.

The tests were based on three kernels

vanilla:	kernel 3.9 as that is what the current mmotm uses as a baseline
mmotm-20130522	is mmotm as of 22nd May with "Reduce system disruption due to
		kswapd" applied on top as per what should be in Andrew's tree
		right now
lessdisrupt-v7r10 is this follow-up series on top of the mmotm kernel

The first test used memcached+memcachetest while some background IO
was in progress as implemented by the parallel IO tests implement in
MM Tests. memcachetest benchmarks how many operations/second memcached
can service. It starts with no background IO on a freshly created ext4
filesystem and then re-runs the test with larger amounts of IO in the
background to roughly simulate a large copy in progress. The expectation
is that the IO should have little or no impact on memcachetest which is
running entirely in memory.

parallelio
                                             3.9.0                       3.9.0                       3.9.0
                                           vanilla          mm1-mmotm-20130522       mm1-lessdisrupt-v7r10
Ops memcachetest-0M             23117.00 (  0.00%)          22780.00 ( -1.46%)          22763.00 ( -1.53%)
Ops memcachetest-715M           23774.00 (  0.00%)          23299.00 ( -2.00%)          22934.00 ( -3.53%)
Ops memcachetest-2385M           4208.00 (  0.00%)          24154.00 (474.00%)          23765.00 (464.76%)
Ops memcachetest-4055M           4104.00 (  0.00%)          25130.00 (512.33%)          24614.00 (499.76%)
Ops io-duration-0M                  0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops io-duration-715M               12.00 (  0.00%)              7.00 ( 41.67%)              6.00 ( 50.00%)
Ops io-duration-2385M             116.00 (  0.00%)             21.00 ( 81.90%)             21.00 ( 81.90%)
Ops io-duration-4055M             160.00 (  0.00%)             36.00 ( 77.50%)             35.00 ( 78.12%)
Ops swaptotal-0M                    0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops swaptotal-715M             140138.00 (  0.00%)             18.00 ( 99.99%)             18.00 ( 99.99%)
Ops swaptotal-2385M            385682.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops swaptotal-4055M            418029.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops swapin-0M                       0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops swapin-715M                   144.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops swapin-2385M               134227.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops swapin-4055M               125618.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops minorfaults-0M            1536429.00 (  0.00%)        1531632.00 (  0.31%)        1533541.00 (  0.19%)
Ops minorfaults-715M          1786996.00 (  0.00%)        1612148.00 (  9.78%)        1608832.00 (  9.97%)
Ops minorfaults-2385M         1757952.00 (  0.00%)        1614874.00 (  8.14%)        1613541.00 (  8.21%)
Ops minorfaults-4055M         1774460.00 (  0.00%)        1633400.00 (  7.95%)        1630881.00 (  8.09%)
Ops majorfaults-0M                  1.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops majorfaults-715M              184.00 (  0.00%)            167.00 (  9.24%)            166.00 (  9.78%)
Ops majorfaults-2385M           24444.00 (  0.00%)            155.00 ( 99.37%)             93.00 ( 99.62%)
Ops majorfaults-4055M           21357.00 (  0.00%)            147.00 ( 99.31%)            134.00 ( 99.37%)

memcachetest is the transactions/second reported by memcachetest. In
        the vanilla kernel note that performance drops from around
        23K/sec to just over 4K/second when there is 2385M of IO going
        on in the background. With current mmotm, there is no collapse
	in performance and with this follow-up series there is little
	change.

swaptotal is the total amount of swap traffic. With mmotm and the follow-up
	series, the total amount of swapping is much reduced.


                                 3.9.0       3.9.0       3.9.0
                               vanillamm1-mmotm-20130522mm1-lessdisrupt-v7r10
Minor Faults                  11160152    10706748    10622316
Major Faults                     46305         755         678
Swap Ins                        260249           0           0
Swap Outs                       683860          18          18
Direct pages scanned                 0         678        2520
Kswapd pages scanned           6046108     8814900     1639279
Kswapd pages reclaimed         1081954     1172267     1094635
Direct pages reclaimed               0         566        2304
Kswapd efficiency                  17%         13%         66%
Kswapd velocity               5217.560    7618.953    1414.879
Direct efficiency                 100%         83%         91%
Direct velocity                  0.000       0.586       2.175
Percentage direct scans             0%          0%          0%
Zone normal velocity          5105.086    6824.681     671.158
Zone dma32 velocity            112.473     794.858     745.896
Zone dma velocity                0.000       0.000       0.000
Page writes by reclaim     1929612.000 6861768.000   32821.000
Page writes file               1245752     6861750       32803
Page writes anon                683860          18          18
Page reclaim immediate            7484          40         239
Sector Reads                   1130320       93996       86900
Sector Writes                 13508052    10823500    11804436
Page rescued immediate               0           0           0
Slabs scanned                    33536       27136       18560
Direct inode steals                  0           0           0
Kswapd inode steals               8641        1035           0
Kswapd skipped wait                  0           0           0
THP fault alloc                      8          37          33
THP collapse alloc                 508         552         515
THP splits                          24           1           1
THP fault fallback                   0           0           0
THP collapse fail                    0           0           0

There are a number of observations to make here

1. Swap outs are almost eliminated. Swap ins are 0 indicating that the
   pages swapped were really unused anonymous pages. Related to that,
   major faults are much reduced.

2. kswapd efficiency was impacted by the initial series but with these
   follow-up patches, the efficiency is now at 66% indicating that far
   fewer pages were skipped during scanning due to dirty or writeback
   pages.

3. kswapd velocity is reduced indicating that fewer pages are being scanned
   with the follow-up series as kswapd now stalls when the tail of the
   LRU queue is full of unqueued dirty pages. The stall gives flushers a
   chance to catch-up so kswapd can reclaim clean pages when it wakes

4. In light of Zlatko's recent reports about zone scanning imbalances,
   mmtests now reports scanning velocity on a per-zone basis. With mainline,
   you can see that the scanning activity is dominated by the Normal
   zone with over 45 times more scanning in Normal than the DMA32 zone.
   With the series currently in mmotm, the ratio is slightly better but it
   is still the case that the bulk of scanning is in the highest zone. With
   this follow-up series, the ratio of scanning between the Normal and
   DMA32 zone is roughly equal.

5. As Dave Chinner observed, the current patches in mmotm increased the
   number of pages written from kswapd context which is expected to adversly
   impact IO performance. With the follow-up patches, far fewer pages are
   written from kswapd context than the mainline kernel

6. With the series in mmotm, fewer inodes were reclaimed by kswapd. With
   the follow-up series, there is less slab shrinking activity and no inodes
   were reclaimed.

7. Note that "Sectors Read" is drastically reduced implying that the source
   data being used for the IO is not being aggressively discarded due to
   page reclaim skipping over dirty pages and reclaiming clean pages. Note
   that the reducion in reads could also be due to inode data not being
   re-read from disk after a slab shrink.

                       3.9.0       3.9.0       3.9.0
                     vanillamm1-mmotm-20130522mm1-lessdisrupt-v7r10
Mean sda-avgqz        166.99       32.09       33.44
Mean sda-await        853.64      192.76      185.43
Mean sda-r_await        6.31        9.24        5.97
Mean sda-w_await     2992.81      202.65      192.43
Max  sda-avgqz       1409.91      718.75      698.98
Max  sda-await       6665.74     3538.00     3124.23
Max  sda-r_await       58.96      111.95       58.00
Max  sda-w_await    28458.94     3977.29     3148.61

In light of the changes in writes from reclaim context, the number of
reads and Dave Chinner's concerns about IO performance I took a closer
look at the IO stats for the test disk. Few observations

1. The average queue size is reduced by the initial series and roughly
   the same with this follow up.

2. Average wait times for writes are reduced and as the IO
   is completing faster it at least implies that the gain is because
   flushers are writing the files efficiently instead of page reclaim
   getting in the way.

3. The reduction in maximum write latency is staggering. 28 seconds down
   to 3 seconds.


Jan Kara asked how NFS is affected by all of this. Unstable pages can
be taken into account as one of the patches in the series shows but it
is still the case that filesystems with unusual handling of dirty or
writeback could still be treated better.

Tests like postmark, fsmark and largedd showed up nothing useful. On my test
setup, pages are simply not being written back from reclaim context with or
without the patches and there are no changes in performance. My test setup
probably is just not strong enough network-wise to be really interesting.

I ran a longer-lived memcached test with IO going to NFS instead of a local disk

parallelio
                                             3.9.0                       3.9.0                       3.9.0
                                           vanilla          mm1-mmotm-20130522       mm1-lessdisrupt-v7r10
Ops memcachetest-0M             23323.00 (  0.00%)          23241.00 ( -0.35%)          23321.00 ( -0.01%)
Ops memcachetest-715M           25526.00 (  0.00%)          24763.00 ( -2.99%)          23242.00 ( -8.95%)
Ops memcachetest-2385M           8814.00 (  0.00%)          26924.00 (205.47%)          23521.00 (166.86%)
Ops memcachetest-4055M           5835.00 (  0.00%)          26827.00 (359.76%)          25560.00 (338.05%)
Ops io-duration-0M                  0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops io-duration-715M               65.00 (  0.00%)             71.00 ( -9.23%)             11.00 ( 83.08%)
Ops io-duration-2385M             129.00 (  0.00%)             94.00 ( 27.13%)             53.00 ( 58.91%)
Ops io-duration-4055M             301.00 (  0.00%)            100.00 ( 66.78%)            108.00 ( 64.12%)
Ops swaptotal-0M                    0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops swaptotal-715M              14394.00 (  0.00%)            949.00 ( 93.41%)             63.00 ( 99.56%)
Ops swaptotal-2385M            401483.00 (  0.00%)          24437.00 ( 93.91%)          30118.00 ( 92.50%)
Ops swaptotal-4055M            554123.00 (  0.00%)          35688.00 ( 93.56%)          63082.00 ( 88.62%)
Ops swapin-0M                       0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops swapin-715M                  4522.00 (  0.00%)            560.00 ( 87.62%)             63.00 ( 98.61%)
Ops swapin-2385M               169861.00 (  0.00%)           5026.00 ( 97.04%)          13917.00 ( 91.81%)
Ops swapin-4055M               192374.00 (  0.00%)          10056.00 ( 94.77%)          25729.00 ( 86.63%)
Ops minorfaults-0M            1445969.00 (  0.00%)        1520878.00 ( -5.18%)        1454024.00 ( -0.56%)
Ops minorfaults-715M          1557288.00 (  0.00%)        1528482.00 (  1.85%)        1535776.00 (  1.38%)
Ops minorfaults-2385M         1692896.00 (  0.00%)        1570523.00 (  7.23%)        1559622.00 (  7.87%)
Ops minorfaults-4055M         1654985.00 (  0.00%)        1581456.00 (  4.44%)        1596713.00 (  3.52%)
Ops majorfaults-0M                  0.00 (  0.00%)              1.00 (-99.00%)              0.00 (  0.00%)
Ops majorfaults-715M              763.00 (  0.00%)            265.00 ( 65.27%)             75.00 ( 90.17%)
Ops majorfaults-2385M           23861.00 (  0.00%)            894.00 ( 96.25%)           2189.00 ( 90.83%)
Ops majorfaults-4055M           27210.00 (  0.00%)           1569.00 ( 94.23%)           4088.00 ( 84.98%)

1. Performance does not collapse due to IO which is good. IO is also completing
   faster. Note with mmotm, IO completes in a third of the time and faster again
   with this series applied

2. Swapping is reduced, although not eliminated. The figures for the follow-up
   look bad but it does vary a bit as the stalling is not perfect for nfs
   or filesystems like ext3 with unusual handling of dirty and writeback
   pages

3. There are swapins, particularly with larger amounts of IO indicating
   that active pages are being reclaimed. However, the number of much
   reduced.

                                 3.9.0       3.9.0       3.9.0
                               vanillamm1-mmotm-20130522mm1-lessdisrupt-v7r10
Minor Faults                  36339175    35025445    35219699
Major Faults                    310964       27108       51887
Swap Ins                       2176399      173069      333316
Swap Outs                      3344050      357228      504824
Direct pages scanned              8972       77283       43242
Kswapd pages scanned          20899983     8939566    14772851
Kswapd pages reclaimed         6193156     5172605     5231026
Direct pages reclaimed            8450       73802       39514
Kswapd efficiency                  29%         57%         35%
Kswapd velocity               3929.743    1847.499    3058.840
Direct efficiency                  94%         95%         91%
Direct velocity                  1.687      15.972       8.954
Percentage direct scans             0%          0%          0%
Zone normal velocity          3721.907     939.103    2185.142
Zone dma32 velocity            209.522     924.368     882.651
Zone dma velocity                0.000       0.000       0.000
Page writes by reclaim     4082185.000  526319.000  537114.000
Page writes file                738135      169091       32290
Page writes anon               3344050      357228      504824
Page reclaim immediate            9524         170     5595843
Sector Reads                   8909900      861192     1483680
Sector Writes                 13428980     1488744     2076800
Page rescued immediate               0           0           0
Slabs scanned                    38016       31744       28672
Direct inode steals                  0           0           0
Kswapd inode steals                424           0           0
Kswapd skipped wait                  0           0           0
THP fault alloc                     14          15         119
THP collapse alloc                1767        1569        1618
THP splits                          30          29          25
THP fault fallback                   0           0           0
THP collapse fail                    8           5           0
Compaction stalls                   17          41         100
Compaction success                   7          31          95
Compaction failures                 10          10           5
Page migrate success              7083       22157       62217
Page migrate failure                 0           0           0
Compaction pages isolated        14847       48758      135830
Compaction migrate scanned       18328       48398      138929
Compaction free scanned        2000255      355827     1720269
Compaction cost                      7          24          68

I guess the main takeaway again is the much reduced page writes
from reclaim context and reduced reads.

                       3.9.0       3.9.0       3.9.0
                     vanillamm1-mmotm-20130522mm1-lessdisrupt-v7r10
Mean sda-avgqz         23.58        0.35        0.44
Mean sda-await        133.47       15.72       15.46
Mean sda-r_await        4.72        4.69        3.95
Mean sda-w_await      507.69       28.40       33.68
Max  sda-avgqz        680.60       12.25       23.14
Max  sda-await       3958.89      221.83      286.22
Max  sda-r_await       63.86       61.23       67.29
Max  sda-w_await    11710.38      883.57     1767.28

And as before, write wait times are much reduced.

 fs/block_dev.c              |   1 +
 fs/buffer.c                 |  34 +++++++++
 fs/ext3/inode.c             |   1 +
 fs/nfs/file.c               |  30 ++++++++
 include/linux/buffer_head.h |   3 +
 include/linux/fs.h          |   1 +
 mm/vmscan.c                 | 164 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------
 7 files changed, 189 insertions(+), 45 deletions(-)

-- 
1.8.1.4

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