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

[Michal Hocko]

On Thu 11-04-13 10:10:44, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 03:28:32PM -0700, dormando wrote:
> > > 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?
> 
> I've never tried it myself but does the following work?
> 
> taskset -p MASK `pidof kswapd`

I would use pgrep rather than pidof which seem to need the whole process
name but yes this should work as kswapdN is not PF_THREAD_BOUND kernel
thread.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/