Re: [PATCH 5/5] mm: workingset: make shadow node shrinker memcg aware

[Johannes Weiner]

On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 05:28:35PM +0300, Vladimir Davydov wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 01:23:53AM -0500, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > It's true that both the shrinking of the active list and subsequent
> > activations to regrow it will reduce the number of actionable
> > refaults, and so it wouldn't be unreasonable to also shrink shadow
> > nodes when the active list shrinks.
> > 
> > However, I think these are too many assumptions to encode in the
> > shrinker, because it is only meant to prevent a worst-case explosion
> > of radix tree nodes. I'd prefer it to be dumb and conservative.
> > 
> > Could we instead go with the current usage of the memcg? Whether
> > reclaim happens globally or due to the memory limit, the usage at the
> > time of reclaim gives a good idea of the memory is available to the
> > group. But it's making less assumptions about the internal composition
> > of the memcg's memory, and the consequences associated with that.
> 
> But that would likely result in wasting a considerable chunk of memory
> for stale shadow nodes in case file caches constitute only a small part
> of memcg memory consumption, which isn't good IMHO.

Hm, that's probably true. But I think it's a separate patch at this
point - going from total memory to the cache portion for overhead
reasons - that shouldn't be conflated with the memcg awareness patch.