[PATCH 0/2] Reduce frequency of stalls due to zone_reclaim() on NUMA v2r1

[Mel Gorman]

Sorry for the resend. I screwed up the patch numbers in the first
sending.

Changelog since v1
  o Dropped PF_SWAPWRITE change as discussions related to it stalled and
    it's not important for fixing the underlying problem.

There have been a small number of complaints about significant stalls
while copying large amounts of data on NUMA machines reported on
a distribution bugzilla. In these cases, zone_reclaim was enabled
by default due to large NUMA distances. In general, the complaints
have not been about the workload itself unless it was a file server
(in which case the recommendation was disable zone_reclaim).

The stalls are mostly due to significant amounts of time spent
scanning the preferred zone for pages to free. After a failure, it
might fallback to another node (as zonelists are often node-ordered
rather than zone-ordered) but stall quickly again when the next
allocation attempt occurs. In bad cases, each page allocated results
in a full scan of the preferred zone.

Patch 1 checks the preferred zone for recent allocation failure which
	is particularly important if zone_reclaim has failed recently.
	This avoids rescanning the zone in the near future and instead
	falling back to another node. This may hurt node locality in
	some cases but a failure to zone_reclaim is more expensive
	than a remote access.

Patch 2 clears the zlc information after direct reclaim. Otherwise,
	zone_reclaim can mark zones full, direct reclaim can
	reclaim enough pages but the zone is still not considered
	for allocation.

This was tested on a 24-thread 2-node x86_64 machine. The tests were
focused on large amounts of IO. All tests were bound to the CPUs
on node-0 to avoid disturbances due to processes being scheduled on
different nodes. The kernels tested are

3.0-rc6-vanilla		Vanilla 3.0-rc6
zlcfirst		Patch 1 applied
zlcreconsider		Patches 1+2 applied

FS-Mark
./fs_mark  -d  /tmp/fsmark-10813  -D  100  -N  5000  -n  208  -L  35  -t  24  -S0  -s  524288
                fsmark-3.0-rc6       3.0-rc6       		3.0-rc6
                   vanilla			 zlcfirs 	zlcreconsider
Files/s  min          54.90 ( 0.00%)       49.80 (-10.24%)       49.10 (-11.81%)
Files/s  mean        100.11 ( 0.00%)      135.17 (25.94%)      146.93 (31.87%)
Files/s  stddev       57.51 ( 0.00%)      138.97 (58.62%)      158.69 (63.76%)
Files/s  max         361.10 ( 0.00%)      834.40 (56.72%)      802.40 (55.00%)
Overhead min       76704.00 ( 0.00%)    76501.00 ( 0.27%)    77784.00 (-1.39%)
Overhead mean    1485356.51 ( 0.00%)  1035797.83 (43.40%)  1594680.26 (-6.86%)
Overhead stddev  1848122.53 ( 0.00%)   881489.88 (109.66%)  1772354.90 ( 4.27%)
Overhead max     7989060.00 ( 0.00%)  3369118.00 (137.13%) 10135324.00 (-21.18%)
MMTests Statistics: duration
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds)        501.49    493.91    499.93
Total Elapsed Time (seconds)               2451.57   2257.48   2215.92

MMTests Statistics: vmstat
Page Ins                                       46268       63840       66008
Page Outs                                   90821596    90671128    88043732
Swap Ins                                           0           0           0
Swap Outs                                          0           0           0
Direct pages scanned                        13091697     8966863     8971790
Kswapd pages scanned                               0     1830011     1831116
Kswapd pages reclaimed                             0     1829068     1829930
Direct pages reclaimed                      13037777     8956828     8648314
Kswapd efficiency                               100%         99%         99%
Kswapd velocity                                0.000     810.643     826.346
Direct efficiency                                99%         99%         96%
Direct velocity                             5340.128    3972.068    4048.788
Percentage direct scans                         100%         83%         83%
Page writes by reclaim                             0           3           0
Slabs scanned                                 796672      720640      720256
Direct inode steals                          7422667     7160012     7088638
Kswapd inode steals                                0     1736840     2021238

Test completes far faster with a large increase in the number of files
created per second. Standard deviation is high as a small number
of iterations were much higher than the mean. The number of pages
scanned by zone_reclaim is reduced and kswapd is used for more work.

LARGE DD
               		3.0-rc6       3.0-rc6       3.0-rc6
                   	vanilla     zlcfirst     zlcreconsider
download tar           59 ( 0.00%)   59 ( 0.00%)   55 ( 7.27%)
dd source files       527 ( 0.00%)  296 (78.04%)  320 (64.69%)
delete source          36 ( 0.00%)   19 (89.47%)   20 (80.00%)
MMTests Statistics: duration
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds)        125.03    118.98    122.01
Total Elapsed Time (seconds)                624.56    375.02    398.06

MMTests Statistics: vmstat
Page Ins                                     3594216      439368      407032
Page Outs                                   23380832    23380488    23377444
Swap Ins                                           0           0           0
Swap Outs                                          0         436         287
Direct pages scanned                        17482342    69315973    82864918
Kswapd pages scanned                               0      519123      575425
Kswapd pages reclaimed                             0      466501      522487
Direct pages reclaimed                       5858054     2732949     2712547
Kswapd efficiency                               100%         89%         90%
Kswapd velocity                                0.000    1384.254    1445.574
Direct efficiency                                33%          3%          3%
Direct velocity                            27991.453  184832.737  208171.929
Percentage direct scans                         100%         99%         99%
Page writes by reclaim                             0        5082       13917
Slabs scanned                                  17280       29952       35328
Direct inode steals                           115257     1431122      332201
Kswapd inode steals                                0           0      979532

This test downloads a large tarfile and copies it with dd a number of
times - similar to the most recent bug report I've dealt with. Time to
completion is reduced. The number of pages scanned directly is still
disturbingly high with a low efficiency but this is likely due to
the number of dirty pages encountered. The figures could probably be
improved with more work around how kswapd is used and how dirty pages
are handled but that is separate work and this result is significant
on its own.

Streaming Mapped Writer
MMTests Statistics: duration
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds)        124.47    111.67    112.64
Total Elapsed Time (seconds)               2138.14   1816.30   1867.56

MMTests Statistics: vmstat
Page Ins                                       90760       89124       89516
Page Outs                                  121028340   120199524   120736696
Swap Ins                                           0          86          55
Swap Outs                                          0           0           0
Direct pages scanned                       114989363    96461439    96330619
Kswapd pages scanned                        56430948    56965763    57075875
Kswapd pages reclaimed                      27743219    27752044    27766606
Direct pages reclaimed                         49777       46884       36655
Kswapd efficiency                                49%         48%         48%
Kswapd velocity                            26392.541   31363.631   30561.736
Direct efficiency                                 0%          0%          0%
Direct velocity                            53780.091   53108.759   51581.004
Percentage direct scans                          67%         62%         62%
Page writes by reclaim                           385         122        1513
Slabs scanned                                  43008       39040       42112
Direct inode steals                                0          10           8
Kswapd inode steals                              733         534         477

This test just creates a large file mapping and writes to it
linearly. Time to completion is again reduced.

The gains are mostly down to two things. In many cases, there
is less scanning as zone_reclaim simply gives up faster due to
recent failures. The second reason is that memory is used more
efficiently. Instead of scanning the preferred zone every time, the
allocator falls back to another zone and uses it instead improving
overall memory utilisation.

 mm/page_alloc.c |   54 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------
 1 files changed, 41 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)

-- 
1.7.3.4

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