Re: [RFC] mm: Proactive compaction

[Vlastimil Babka]

On 9/20/19 1:37 AM, Nitin Gupta wrote:
> On Tue, 2019-08-20 at 10:46 +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
>>
>> That's a lot of control knobs - how is an admin supposed to tune them to
>> their
>> needs?
> 
> 
> Yes, it's difficult for an admin to get so many tunable right unless
> targeting a very specific workload.
> 
> How about a simpler solution where we exposed just one tunable per-node:
>    /sys/.../node-x/compaction_effort
> which accepts [0, 100]
> 
> This parallels /proc/sys/vm/swappiness but for compaction. With this
> single number, we can estimate per-order [low, high] watermarks for external
> fragmentation like this:
>  - For now, map this range to [low, medium, high] which correponds to specific
> low, high thresholds for extfrag.
>  - Apply more relaxed thresholds for higher-order than for lower orders.
> 
> With this single tunable we remove the burden of setting per-order explicit
> [low, high] thresholds and it should be easier to experiment with.

What about instead autotuning by the numbers of allocations hitting
direct compaction recently? IIRC there were attempts in the past (myself
included) and recently Khalid's that was quite elaborated.

> -Nitin
> 
> 
>