[PATCH] mm: page_alloc: Default to node-ordering on 64-bit NUMA machines

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Mon Sep 01 2014 - 08:56:04 EST

Zones are allocated by the page allocator in either node or zone order.
Node ordering is preferred in terms of locality and is applied automatically
in one of three cases.

1. If a node has only low memory

2. If DMA/DMA32 is a high percentage of memory

3. If low memory on a single node is greater than 70% of the node size

Otherwise zone ordering is used to preserve low memory. Unfortunately
a consequence of this is that a machine with balanced NUMA nodes will
experience different performance characteristics depending on which node
they happen to start from.

The point of zone ordering is to protect lower nodes for devices that require
DMA/DMA32 memory. When NUMA was first introduced, this was critical as 32-bit
NUMA machines commonly suffered from low memory exhaustion problems. On
64-bit machines the primary concern is devices that are 32-bit only which
is less severe than the low memory exhaustion problem on 32-bit NUMA. It
seems there are really few devices that depends on it.

AGP -- I assume this is getting more rare but even then I think the allocations
happen early in boot time where lowmem pressure is less of a problem

DRM -- If the device is 32-bit only then there may be low pressure. I didn't
evaluate these in detail but it looks like some of these are mobile
graphics card. Not many NUMA laptops out there. DRM folk should know
better though.

Some TV cards -- Much demand for 32-bit capable TV cards on NUMA machines?

B43 wireless card -- again not really a NUMA thing.

I cannot find a good reason to incur a performance penalty on all 64-bit NUMA
machines in case someone throws a brain damanged TV or graphics card in there.
This patch defaults to node-ordering on 64-bit NUMA machines. I was tempted
to make it default everywhere but I understand that some embedded arches may
be using 32-bit NUMA where I cannot predict the consequences.

The performance impact depends on the workload and the characteristics of the
machine and the machine I tested on had a large Normal zone on node 0 so the
impact is within the noise for the majority of tests. The allocation stats
show more allocation requests were from DMA32 and local node. Running SpecJBB
with multiple JVMs and automatic NUMA balancing disabled the results were

specjbb
3.17.0-rc2 3.17.0-rc2
vanilla nodeorder-v1r1
Min 1 29534.00 ( 0.00%) 30020.00 ( 1.65%)
Min 10 115717.00 ( 0.00%) 134038.00 ( 15.83%)
Min 19 109718.00 ( 0.00%) 114186.00 ( 4.07%)
Min 28 104459.00 ( 0.00%) 103639.00 ( -0.78%)
Min 37 98245.00 ( 0.00%) 103756.00 ( 5.61%)
Min 46 97198.00 ( 0.00%) 96197.00 ( -1.03%)
Mean 1 30953.25 ( 0.00%) 31917.75 ( 3.12%)
Mean 10 124432.50 ( 0.00%) 140904.00 ( 13.24%)
Mean 19 116033.50 ( 0.00%) 119294.75 ( 2.81%)
Mean 28 108365.25 ( 0.00%) 106879.50 ( -1.37%)
Mean 37 102984.75 ( 0.00%) 106924.25 ( 3.83%)
Mean 46 100783.25 ( 0.00%) 105368.50 ( 4.55%)
Stddev 1 1260.38 ( 0.00%) 1109.66 ( 11.96%)
Stddev 10 7434.03 ( 0.00%) 5171.91 ( 30.43%)
Stddev 19 8453.84 ( 0.00%) 5309.59 ( 37.19%)
Stddev 28 4184.55 ( 0.00%) 2906.63 ( 30.54%)
Stddev 37 5409.49 ( 0.00%) 3192.12 ( 40.99%)
Stddev 46 4521.95 ( 0.00%) 7392.52 (-63.48%)
Max 1 32738.00 ( 0.00%) 32719.00 ( -0.06%)
Max 10 136039.00 ( 0.00%) 148614.00 ( 9.24%)
Max 19 130566.00 ( 0.00%) 127418.00 ( -2.41%)
Max 28 115404.00 ( 0.00%) 111254.00 ( -3.60%)
Max 37 112118.00 ( 0.00%) 111732.00 ( -0.34%)
Max 46 108541.00 ( 0.00%) 116849.00 ( 7.65%)
TPut 1 123813.00 ( 0.00%) 127671.00 ( 3.12%)
TPut 10 497730.00 ( 0.00%) 563616.00 ( 13.24%)
TPut 19 464134.00 ( 0.00%) 477179.00 ( 2.81%)
TPut 28 433461.00 ( 0.00%) 427518.00 ( -1.37%)
TPut 37 411939.00 ( 0.00%) 427697.00 ( 3.83%)
TPut 46 403133.00 ( 0.00%) 421474.00 ( 4.55%)

3.17.0-rc2 3.17.0-rc2
vanillanodeorder-v1r1
DMA allocs 0 0
DMA32 allocs 57 1491992
Normal allocs 32543566 30026383
Movable allocs 0 0
Direct pages scanned 0 0
Kswapd pages scanned 0 0
Kswapd pages reclaimed 0 0
Direct pages reclaimed 0 0
Kswapd efficiency 100% 100%
Kswapd velocity 0.000 0.000
Direct efficiency 100% 100%
Direct velocity 0.000 0.000
Percentage direct scans 0% 0%
Zone normal velocity 0.000 0.000
Zone dma32 velocity 0.000 0.000
Zone dma velocity 0.000 0.000
THP fault alloc 55164 52987
THP collapse alloc 139 147
THP splits 26 21
NUMA alloc hit 4169066 4250692
NUMA alloc miss 0 0

Note that there were more DMA32 allocations with the patch applied. In this
particular case there was no difference in numa_hit and numa_miss. The
expectation is that DMA32 was being used at the low watermark instead of
falling into the slow path. kswapd was not woken but it's not worken for
THP allocations.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
---
mm/page_alloc.c | 12 ++++++++++++
1 file changed, 12 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 18cee0d..20059aa 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -3579,6 +3579,17 @@ static void build_zonelists_in_zone_order(pg_data_t *pgdat, int nr_nodes)
zonelist->_zonerefs[pos].zone_idx = 0;
}

+#if defined(CONFIG_64BIT)
+
+/* Devices that require DMA32/DMA are relatively rare and do not justify a
+ * penalty to every machine in case the specialised case applies. Default
+ * to Node-ordering on 64-bit NUMA machines
+ */
+static int default_zonelist_order(void)
+{
+ return ZONELIST_ORDER_NODE;
+}
+#else
static int default_zonelist_order(void)
{
int nid, zone_type;
@@ -3641,6 +3652,7 @@ static int default_zonelist_order(void)
}
return ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE;
}
+#endif /* CONFIG_64BIT */

static void set_zonelist_order(void)
{
--
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