Re: [PATCH 00/27] Move LRU page reclaim from zones to nodes v7

[Mel Gorman]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 04:35:45PM +1000, Balbir Singh wrote:
> > 1. The residency of a page partially depends on what zone the page was
> >    allocated from.  This is partially combatted by the fair zone allocation
> >    policy but that is a partial solution that introduces overhead in the
> >    page allocator paths.
> > 
> > 2. Currently, reclaim on node 0 behaves slightly different to node 1. For
> >    example, direct reclaim scans in zonelist order and reclaims even if
> >    the zone is over the high watermark regardless of the age of pages
> >    in that LRU. Kswapd on the other hand starts reclaim on the highest
> >    unbalanced zone. A difference in distribution of file/anon pages due
> >    to when they were allocated results can result in a difference in 
> >    again. While the fair zone allocation policy mitigates some of the
> >    problems here, the page reclaim results on a multi-zone node will
> >    always be different to a single-zone node.
> >    it was scheduled on as a result.
> > 
> > 3. kswapd and the page allocator scan zones in the opposite order to
> >    avoid interfering with each other but it's sensitive to timing.  This
> >    mitigates the page allocator using pages that were allocated very recently
> >    in the ideal case but it's sensitive to timing. When kswapd is allocating
> >    from lower zones then it's great but during the rebalancing of the highest
> >    zone, the page allocator and kswapd interfere with each other. It's worse
> >    if the highest zone is small and difficult to balance.
> > 
> > 4. slab shrinkers are node-based which makes it harder to identify the exact
> >    relationship between slab reclaim and LRU reclaim.
> > 
> 
> Sorry, I am late in reading the thread and the patches, but I am trying to understand
> the key benefits?

The key benefits were outlined at the beginning of the changelog. The
one that is missing is the large overhead from the fair zone allocation
policy which can be removed safely by the feature. The benefit to page
allocator micro-benchmarks is outlined in the series introduction.

> I know that
> zones have grown to be overloaded to mean many things now. What is the contention impact
> of moving the LRU from zone to nodes?

Expected to be minimal. On NUMA machines, most nodes have only one zone.
On machines with multiple zones, the lock per zone is not that fine-grained
given the size of the zones on large memory configurations.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs