Re: [PATCH 1/2 v3] mm: vmscan: do not pass reclaimed slab to vmpressure

[Michal Hocko]

On Fri 03-02-17 10:56:42, vinayak menon wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 9:31 PM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Why would you like to chose and kill a task when the slab reclaim can
> > still make sufficient progres? Are you sure that the slab contribution
> > to the stats makes all the above happening?
> >
> I agree that a task need not be killed if sufficient progress is made
> in reclaiming
> memory say from slab. But here it looks like we have an impact because of just
> increasing the reclaimed without touching the scanned. It could be because of
> disimilar costs or not adding adding cost. I agree that vmpressure is
> only a reasonable
> estimate which does not already include few other costs, but I am not
> sure whether it is ok
> to add another element which further increases that disparity.
> We noticed this problem when moving from 3.18 to 4.4 kernel version. With the
> same workload, the vmpressure events differ between 3.18 and 4.4 causing the
> above mentioned problem. And with this patch on 4.4 we get the same results
> as in 3,18. So the slab contribution to stats is making a difference.

Please document that in the changelog along with description of the
workload that is affected. Ideally also add some data from /proc/vmstat
so that we can see the reclaim activity.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs