Re: [RFC PATCH v2 3/4] mm/rmqueue_bulk: alloc without touching individual page structure

[Daniel Jordan]

On 03/21/2018 11:01 AM, Aaron Lu wrote:
> > I'm sorry, but I feel the added complexity here is simply too large to
> > justify the change. Especially if the motivation seems to be just the
> > microbenchmark. It would be better if this was motivated by a real
> > workload where zone lock contention was identified as the main issue,
> > and we would see the improvements on the workload. We could also e.g.
> > find out that the problem can be avoided at a different level.
>
> One thing I'm aware of is there is some app that consumes a ton of
> memory and when it misbehaves or crashes, it takes some 10-20 minutes to
> have it exit(munmap() takes a long time to free all those consumed
> memory).
>
> THP could help a lot, but it's beyond my understanding why they didn't
> use it.

One of our apps has the same issue with taking a long time to exit.  The 
time is in the kernel's munmap/exit path.

Also, Vlastimil, to your point about real workloads, I've seen 
zone->lock and lru_lock heavily contended in a decision support 
benchmark.  Setting the pcp list sizes artificially high with 
percpu_pagelist_fraction didn't make it go any faster, but given that 
Aaron and I have seen the contention shift to lru_lock in this case, I'm 
curious what will happen to the benchmark when both locks are no longer 
contended.  Will report back once this experiment is done.