RE: [PATCH 1/2] sched/wait: Break up long wake list walk

[Liang, Kan]

> On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 01:44:40PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 1:18 PM, Liang, Kan <kan.liang@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > Here is the call stack of wait_on_page_bit_common when the queue is
> > > long (entries >1000).
> > >
> > > # Overhead  Trace output
> > > # ........  ..................
> > > #
> > >    100.00%  (ffffffff931aefca)
> > >             |
> > >             ---wait_on_page_bit
> > >                __migration_entry_wait
> > >                migration_entry_wait
> > >                do_swap_page
> > >                __handle_mm_fault
> > >                handle_mm_fault
> > >                __do_page_fault
> > >                do_page_fault
> > >                page_fault
> >
> > Hmm. Ok, so it does seem to very much be related to migration. Your
> > wake_up_page_bit() profile made me suspect that, but this one seems to
> > pretty much confirm it.
> >
> > So it looks like that wait_on_page_locked() thing in
> > __migration_entry_wait(), and what probably happens is that your load
> > ends up triggering a lot of migration (or just migration of a very hot
> > page), and then *every* thread ends up waiting for whatever page that
> > ended up getting migrated.
> >
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > And so the wait queue for that page grows hugely long.
> >
> 
> It's basically only bounded by the maximum number of threads that can exist.
> 
> > Looking at the other profile, the thing that is locking the page (that
> > everybody then ends up waiting on) would seem to be
> > migrate_misplaced_transhuge_page(), so this is _presumably_ due to
> > NUMA balancing.
> >
> 
> Yes, migrate_misplaced_transhuge_page requires NUMA balancing to be
> part of the picture.
> 
> > Does the problem go away if you disable the NUMA balancing code?
> >
> > Adding Mel and Kirill to the participants, just to make them aware of
> > the issue, and just because their names show up when I look at blame.
> >
> 
> I'm not imagining a way of dealing with this that would reliably detect when
> there are a large number of waiters without adding a mess. We could adjust
> the scanning rate to reduce the problem but it would be difficult to target
> properly and wouldn't prevent the problem occurring with the added hassle
> that it would now be intermittent.
> 
> Assuming the problem goes away by disabling NUMA then it would be nice if
> it could be determined that the page lock holder is trying to allocate a page
> when the queue is huge. That is part of the operation that potentially takes a
> long time and may be why so many callers are stacking up. If so, I would
> suggest clearing __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM from the GFP flags in
> migrate_misplaced_transhuge_page and assume that a remote hit is always
> going to be cheaper than compacting memory to successfully allocate a THP.
> That may be worth doing unconditionally because we'd have to save a
> *lot* of remote misses to offset compaction cost.
> 
> Nothing fancy other than needing a comment if it works.
> 

No, the patch doesn't work.

Thanks,
Kan

> diff --git a/mm/migrate.c b/mm/migrate.c index
> 627671551873..87b0275ddcdb 100644
> --- a/mm/migrate.c
> +++ b/mm/migrate.c
> @@ -1926,7 +1926,7 @@ int migrate_misplaced_transhuge_page(struct
> mm_struct *mm,
>  		goto out_dropref;
> 
>  	new_page = alloc_pages_node(node,
> -		(GFP_TRANSHUGE_LIGHT | __GFP_THISNODE),
> +		(GFP_TRANSHUGE_LIGHT | __GFP_THISNODE) &
> ~__GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM,
>  		HPAGE_PMD_ORDER);
>  	if (!new_page)
>  		goto out_fail;
> 
> --
> Mel Gorman
> SUSE Labs