Re: [PATCH 0/10] Reduce system disruption due to kswapd V2

[dormando]

> On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 05:27:18PM +0000, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > One additional measure that may be useful is to make kswapd prefer one
> > specific processor on a socket. Two benefits arise from that:
> >
> > 1. Better use of cpu caches and therefore higher speed, less
> > serialization.
> >
>
> Considering the volume of pages that kswapd can scan when it's active
> I would expect that it trashes its cache anyway. The L1 cache would be
> flushed after scanning struct pages for just a few MB of memory.
>
> > 2. Reduction of the disturbances to one processor.
> >
>
> I've never checked it but I would have expected kswapd to stay on the
> same processor for significant periods of time. Have you experienced
> problems where kswapd bounces around on CPUs within a node causing
> workload disruption?

When kswapd shares the same CPU as our main process it causes a measurable
drop in response time (graphs show tiny spikes at the same time memory is
freed). Would be nice to be able to ensure it runs on a different core
than our latency sensitive processes at least. We can pin processes to
subsets of cores but I don't think there's a way to keep kswapd from
waking up on any of them?
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