Re: [External] Re: [PATCH v3 2/4] mm: memcontrol: make page_memcg{_rcu} only applicable for non-kmem page

[Johannes Weiner]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 02:42:45PM -0800, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> Hi Johannes,
> 
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 11:23 AM Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> [...]
> >
> > Longer term we most likely need it there anyway. The issue you are
> > describing in the cover letter - allocations pinning memcgs for a long
> > time - it exists at a larger scale and is causing recurring problems
> > in the real world: page cache doesn't get reclaimed for a long time,
> > or is used by the second, third, fourth, ... instance of the same job
> > that was restarted into a new cgroup every time. Unreclaimable dying
> > cgroups pile up, waste memory, and make page reclaim very inefficient.
> >
> 
> For the scenario described above, do we really want to reparent the
> page cache pages? Shouldn't we recharge the pages to the second,
> third, fourth and so on, memcgs? My concern is that we will see a big
> chunk of page cache pages charged to root and will only get reclaimed
> on global pressure.

Sorry, I'm proposing to reparent to the ancestor, not root. It's an
optimization, not a change in user-visible behavior.

As far as the user can tell, the pages already belong to the parent
after deletion: they'll show up in the parent's stats, naturally, and
they will get reclaimed as part of the parent being reclaimed.

The dead cgroup doesn't even have its own limit anymore after
.css_reset() has run. And we already physically reparent slab objects
in memcg_reparent_objcgs() and memcg_drain_all_list_lrus().

I'm just saying we should do the same thing for LRU pages.