Re: [RFC PATCH 0/8] memcg: Enable fine-grained per process memory control

[Waiman Long]

On 8/18/20 5:27 AM, Chris Down wrote:
> peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> > On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 10:08:23AM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> > > Memory controller can be used to control and limit the amount of
> > > physical memory used by a task. When a limit is set in "memory.high" in
> > > a v2 non-root memory cgroup, the memory controller will try to reclaim
> > > memory if the limit has been exceeded. Normally, that will be enough
> > > to keep the physical memory consumption of tasks in the memory cgroup
> > > to be around or below the "memory.high" limit.
> > >
> > > Sometimes, memory reclaim may not be able to recover memory in a rate
> > > that can catch up to the physical memory allocation rate. In this case,
> > > the physical memory consumption will keep on increasing.
> >
> > Then slow down the allocator? That's what we do for dirty pages too, we
> > slow down the dirtier when we run against the limits.
>
> We already do that since v5.4. I'm wondering whether Waiman's customer 
> is just running with a too-old kernel without 0e4b01df865 ("mm, memcg: 
> throttle allocators when failing reclaim over memory.high") backported.
The fact is that we don't have that in RHEL8 yet and cgroup v2 is still 
not the default at the moment.

I am planning to backport the throttling patches to RHEL and hopefully 
can switch to use cgroup v2 soon.

Cheers,
Longman