Re: [PATCH 2/2] memcg: infrastructure to flush memcg stats

[Shakeel Butt]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 1:24 PM Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> At the moment memcg stats are read in four contexts:
>
> 1. memcg stat user interfaces
> 2. dirty throttling
> 3. page fault
> 4. memory reclaim
>
> Currently the kernel flushes the stats for first two cases. Flushing the
> stats for remaining two casese may have performance impact. Always
> flushing the memcg stats on the page fault code path may negatively
> impacts the performance of the applications. In addition flushing in the
> memory reclaim code path, though treated as slowpath, can become the
> source of contention for the global lock taken for stat flushing because
> when system or memcg is under memory pressure, many tasks may enter the
> reclaim path.
>
> This patch uses following mechanisms to solve these challenges:
>
> 1. Periodically flush the stats from root memcg every 2 seconds. This
> will time limit the out of sync stats.
>
> 2. Asynchronously flush the stats after fixed number of stat updates.
> In the worst case the stat can be out of sync by O(nr_cpus * BATCH) for
> 2 seconds.
>
> 3. For avoiding thundering herd to flush the stats particularly from the
> memory reclaim context, introduce memcg local spinlock and let only one
> flusher active at a time. This could have been done through
> cgroup_rstat_lock lock but that lock is used by other subsystem and for
> userspace reading memcg stats. So, it is better to keep flushers
> introduced by this patch decoupled from cgroup_rstat_lock.
> ---
> Changes since v2:
> - Changed the subject of the patch
> - Added mechanism to bound errors to nr_cpus instead of nr_cgroups
> - memcg local lock to let one active flusher
>
> Changes since v1:
> - use system_unbound_wq for flushing the memcg stats
>

Forgot to add v3 in the subject for this patch.