Re: [PATCH v2 3/4] mm/vmscan: Don't change pgdat state on base of a single LRU list state.

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Thu Apr 05 2018 - 18:17:59 EST


On Fri, 23 Mar 2018 18:20:28 +0300 Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> We have separate LRU list for each memory cgroup. Memory reclaim iterates
> over cgroups and calls shrink_inactive_list() every inactive LRU list.
> Based on the state of a single LRU shrink_inactive_list() may flag
> the whole node as dirty,congested or under writeback. This is obviously
> wrong and hurtful. It's especially hurtful when we have possibly
> small congested cgroup in system. Than *all* direct reclaims waste time
> by sleeping in wait_iff_congested(). And the more memcgs in the system
> we have the longer memory allocation stall is, because
> wait_iff_congested() called on each lru-list scan.
>
> Sum reclaim stats across all visited LRUs on node and flag node as dirty,
> congested or under writeback based on that sum. Also call
> congestion_wait(), wait_iff_congested() once per pgdat scan, instead of
> once per lru-list scan.
>
> This only fixes the problem for global reclaim case. Per-cgroup reclaim
> may alter global pgdat flags too, which is wrong. But that is separate
> issue and will be addressed in the next patch.
>
> This change will not have any effect on a systems with all workload
> concentrated in a single cgroup.
>

Could we please get this reviewed?