Re: [patch 1/4] mm: memcontrol: reduce reclaim invocations for higher order requests

[Johannes Weiner]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2014 at 03:08:22PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Mon 04-08-14 17:14:54, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > Instead of passing the request size to direct reclaim, memcg just
> > manually loops around reclaiming SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages until the
> > charge can succeed.  That potentially wastes scan progress when huge
> > page allocations require multiple invocations, which always have to
> > restart from the default scan priority.
> > 
> > Pass the request size as a reclaim target to direct reclaim and leave
> > it to that code to reach the goal.
> 
> THP charge then will ask for 512 pages to be (direct) reclaimed. That
> is _a lot_ and I would expect long stalls to achieve this target. I
> would also expect quick priority drop down and potential over-reclaim
> for small and moderately sized memcgs (e.g. memcg with 1G worth of pages
> would need to drop down below DEF_PRIORITY-2 to have a chance to scan
> that many pages). All that done for a charge which can fallback to a
> single page charge.
> 
> The current code is quite hostile to THP when we are close to the limit
> but solving this by introducing long stalls instead doesn't sound like a
> proper approach to me.

THP latencies are actually the same when comparing high limit nr_pages
reclaim with the current hard limit SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX reclaim, although
system time is reduced with the high limit.

High limit reclaim with SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX has better fault latency but
it doesn't actually contain the workload - with 1G high and a 4G load,
the consumption at the end of the run is 3.7G.

So what I'm proposing works and is of equal quality from a THP POV.
This change is complicated enough when we stick to the facts, let's
not make up things based on gut feeling.
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