Re: [RFC] mm: bail out in shrin_inactive_list

[Mel Gorman]

There is a typo in the subject line.

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 04:51:59PM +0900, Minchan Kim wrote:
> With node-lru, if there are enough reclaimable pages in highmem
> but nothing in lowmem, VM can try to shrink inactive list although
> the requested zone is lowmem.
> 
> The problem is direct reclaimer scans inactive list is fulled with


> highmem pages to find a victim page at a reqested zone or lower zones
> but the result is that VM should skip all of pages. 

Rephease -- The problem is that if the inactive list is full of highmem
pages then a direct reclaimer searching for a lowmem page waste CPU
scanning uselessly.

> CPU. Even, many direct reclaimers are stalled by too_many_isolated
> if lots of parallel reclaimer are going on although there are no
> reclaimable memory in inactive list.
> 
> I tried the experiment 4 times in 32bit 2G 8 CPU KVM machine
> to get elapsed time.
> 
> 	hackbench 500 process 2
> 
> = Old =
> 
> 1st: 289s 2nd: 310s 3rd: 112s 4th: 272s
> 
> = Now =
> 
> 1st: 31s  2nd: 132s 3rd: 162s 4th: 50s.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> I believe proper fix is to modify get_scan_count. IOW, I think
> we should introduce lruvec_reclaimable_lru_size with proper
> classzone_idx but I don't know how we can fix it with memcg
> which doesn't have zone stat now. should introduce zone stat
> back to memcg? Or, it's okay to ignore memcg?
> 

I think it's ok to ignore memcg in this case as a memcg shrink is often
going to be for pages that can use highmem anyway.

>  mm/vmscan.c | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 28 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
> index e5af357..3d285cc 100644
> --- a/mm/vmscan.c
> +++ b/mm/vmscan.c
> @@ -1652,6 +1652,31 @@ static int current_may_throttle(void)
>  		bdi_write_congested(current->backing_dev_info);
>  }
>  
> +static inline bool inactive_reclaimable_pages(struct lruvec *lruvec,
> +				struct scan_control *sc,
> +				enum lru_list lru)

inline is unnecessary. The function is long but only has one caller so
it'll be inlined automatically.

> +{
> +	int zid;
> +	struct zone *zone;
> +	bool file = is_file_lru(lru);

It's more appropriate to use int for file in this case as it's used as a
multiplier. It'll work either way.

Otherwise;

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs