Re: [PATCH -mm] mm: Clear to access sub-page last when clearing huge page

[Kirill A. Shutemov]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2017 at 03:21:31PM +0800, Huang, Ying wrote:
> From: Huang Ying <ying.huang@xxxxxxxxx>
> 
> Huge page helps to reduce TLB miss rate, but it has higher cache
> footprint, sometimes this may cause some issue.  For example, when
> clearing huge page on x86_64 platform, the cache footprint is 2M.  But
> on a Xeon E5 v3 2699 CPU, there are 18 cores, 36 threads, and only 45M
> LLC (last level cache).  That is, in average, there are 2.5M LLC for
> each core and 1.25M LLC for each thread.  If the cache pressure is
> heavy when clearing the huge page, and we clear the huge page from the
> begin to the end, it is possible that the begin of huge page is
> evicted from the cache after we finishing clearing the end of the huge
> page.  And it is possible for the application to access the begin of
> the huge page after clearing the huge page.
> 
> To help the above situation, in this patch, when we clear a huge page,
> the order to clear sub-pages is changed.  In quite some situation, we
> can get the address that the application will access after we clear
> the huge page, for example, in a page fault handler.  Instead of
> clearing the huge page from begin to end, we will clear the sub-pages
> farthest from the the sub-page to access firstly, and clear the
> sub-page to access last.  This will make the sub-page to access most
> cache-hot and sub-pages around it more cache-hot too.  If we cannot
> know the address the application will access, the begin of the huge
> page is assumed to be the the address the application will access.
> 
> With this patch, the throughput increases ~28.3% in vm-scalability
> anon-w-seq test case with 72 processes on a 2 socket Xeon E5 v3 2699
> system (36 cores, 72 threads).  The test case creates 72 processes,
> each process mmap a big anonymous memory area and writes to it from
> the begin to the end.  For each process, other processes could be seen
> as other workload which generates heavy cache pressure.  At the same
> time, the cache miss rate reduced from ~33.4% to ~31.7%, the
> IPC (instruction per cycle) increased from 0.56 to 0.74, and the time
> spent in user space is reduced ~7.9%

That's impressive.

But what about the case when we are not bounded that much by the size of
LLC? What about running the same test on the same hardware, but with 4
processes instead of 72.

I just want to make sure we don't regress on more realistic tast case.

-- 
 Kirill A. Shutemov