Re: [PATCH 4/5] mm, compaction: always update cached scanner positions
From: Rik van Riel
Date: Mon Oct 20 2014 - 11:27:23 EST
On 10/07/2014 11:33 AM, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
Compaction caches the migration and free scanner positions between compaction
invocations, so that the whole zone gets eventually scanned and there is no
bias towards the initial scanner positions at the beginning/end of the zone.
The cached positions are continuously updated as scanners progress and the
updating stops as soon as a page is successfully isolated. The reasoning
behind this is that a pageblock where isolation succeeded is likely to succeed
again in near future and it should be worth revisiting it.
However, the downside is that potentially many pages are rescanned without
successful isolation. At worst, there might be a page where isolation from LRU
succeeds but migration fails (potentially always). So upon encountering this
page, cached position would always stop being updated for no good reason.
It might have been useful to let such page be rescanned with sync compaction
after async one failed, but this is now handled by caching scanner position
for async and sync mode separately since commit 35979ef33931 ("mm, compaction:
add per-zone migration pfn cache for async compaction").
After this patch, cached positions are updated unconditionally. In
stress-highalloc benchmark, this has decreased the numbers of scanned pages
by few percent, without affecting allocation success rates.
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz <mina86@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>
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