Re: [RFC PATCH v5 13/16] slub: Enable balancing slabs across nodes

[Tobin C. Harding]

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 01:04:10AM +0000, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 03:40:14PM +1000, Tobin C. Harding wrote:
> > We have just implemented Slab Movable Objects (SMO).  On NUMA systems
> > slabs can become unbalanced i.e. many slabs on one node while other
> > nodes have few slabs.  Using SMO we can balance the slabs across all
> > the nodes.
> > 
> > The algorithm used is as follows:
> > 
> >  1. Move all objects to node 0 (this has the effect of defragmenting the
> >     cache).
> 
> This already sounds dangerous (or costly). Can't it be done without
> cross-node data moves?
>
> > 
> >  2. Calculate the desired number of slabs for each node (this is done
> >     using the approximation nr_slabs / nr_nodes).
> 
> So that on this step only (actual data size - desired data size) has
> to be moved?

This is just the most braindead algorithm I could come up with.  Surely
there are a bunch of things that could be improved.  Since I don't know
the exact use case it seemed best not to optimize for any one use case.

I'll review, comment on, and test any algorithm you come up with!

thanks,
Tobin.