Re: [PATCH v2 3/5] mm: memcg: make stats flushing threshold per-memcg

[Oliver Sang]

hi, Yosry Ahmed, hi, Shakeel Butt,

On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 03:23:06PM -0700, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 2:39 PM Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 2:20 PM Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > [...]
> > > >
> > > > Yes this looks better. I think we should also ask intel perf and
> > > > phoronix folks to run their benchmarks as well (but no need to block
> > > > on them).
> > >
> > > Anything I need to do for this to happen? (I thought such testing is
> > > already done on linux-next)
> >
> > Just Cced the relevant folks.
> >
> > Michael, Oliver & Feng, if you have some time/resource available,
> > please do trigger your performance benchmarks on the following series
> > (but nothing urgent):
> >
> > https://lore.kernel.org/all/20231010032117.1577496-1-yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx/
> 
> Thanks for that.

we (0day team) have already applied the patch-set as:

c5f50d8b23c79 (linux-review/Yosry-Ahmed/mm-memcg-change-flush_next_time-to-flush_last_time/20231010-112257) mm: memcg: restore subtree stats flushing
ac8a48ba9e1ca mm: workingset: move the stats flush into workingset_test_recent()
51d74c18a9c61 mm: memcg: make stats flushing threshold per-memcg
130617edc1cd1 mm: memcg: move vmstats structs definition above flushing code
26d0ee342efc6 mm: memcg: change flush_next_time to flush_last_time
25478183883e6 Merge branch 'mm-nonmm-unstable' into mm-everything   <---- the base our tool picked for the patch set

they've already in our so-called hourly-kernel which under various function
and performance tests.

our 0day test logic is if we found any regression by these hourly-kernels
comparing to base (e.g. milestone release), auto-bisect will be triggnered.
then we only report when we capture a first bad commit for a regression.

based on this, if you don't receive any report in following 2-3 weeks, you
could think 0day cannot capture any regression from your patch-set.

*However*, please be aware that 0day is not a traditional CI system, and also
due to resource constraints, we cannot guaratee coverage, we cannot tigger
specific tests for your patchset, either.
(sorry if this is not your expectation)


> 
> >
> > >
> > > Also, any further comments on the patch (or the series in general)? If
> > > not, I can send a new commit message for this patch in-place.
> >
> > Sorry, I haven't taken a look yet but will try in a week or so.
> 
> Sounds good, thanks.
> 
> Meanwhile, Andrew, could you please replace the commit log of this
> patch as follows for more updated testing info:
> 
> Subject: [PATCH v2 3/5] mm: memcg: make stats flushing threshold per-memcg
> 
> A global counter for the magnitude of memcg stats update is maintained
> on the memcg side to avoid invoking rstat flushes when the pending
> updates are not significant. This avoids unnecessary flushes, which are
> not very cheap even if there isn't a lot of stats to flush. It also
> avoids unnecessary lock contention on the underlying global rstat lock.
> 
> Make this threshold per-memcg. The scheme is followed where percpu (now
> also per-memcg) counters are incremented in the update path, and only
> propagated to per-memcg atomics when they exceed a certain threshold.
> 
> This provides two benefits:
> (a) On large machines with a lot of memcgs, the global threshold can be
> reached relatively fast, so guarding the underlying lock becomes less
> effective. Making the threshold per-memcg avoids this.
> 
> (b) Having a global threshold makes it hard to do subtree flushes, as we
> cannot reset the global counter except for a full flush. Per-memcg
> counters removes this as a blocker from doing subtree flushes, which
> helps avoid unnecessary work when the stats of a small subtree are
> needed.
> 
> Nothing is free, of course. This comes at a cost:
> (a) A new per-cpu counter per memcg, consuming NR_CPUS * NR_MEMCGS * 4
> bytes. The extra memory usage is insigificant.
> 
> (b) More work on the update side, although in the common case it will
> only be percpu counter updates. The amount of work scales with the
> number of ancestors (i.e. tree depth). This is not a new concept, adding
> a cgroup to the rstat tree involves a parent loop, so is charging.
> Testing results below show no significant regressions.
> 
> (c) The error margin in the stats for the system as a whole increases
> from NR_CPUS * MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH to NR_CPUS * MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH *
> NR_MEMCGS. This is probably fine because we have a similar per-memcg
> error in charges coming from percpu stocks, and we have a periodic
> flusher that makes sure we always flush all the stats every 2s anyway.
> 
> This patch was tested to make sure no significant regressions are
> introduced on the update path as follows. The following benchmarks were
> ran in a cgroup that is 2 levels deep (/sys/fs/cgroup/a/b/):
> 
> (1) Running 22 instances of netperf on a 44 cpu machine with
> hyperthreading disabled. All instances are run in a level 2 cgroup, as
> well as netserver:
>   # netserver -6
>   # netperf -6 -H ::1 -l 60 -t TCP_SENDFILE -- -m 10K
> 
> Averaging 20 runs, the numbers are as follows:
> Base: 40198.0 mbps
> Patched: 38629.7 mbps (-3.9%)
> 
> The regression is minimal, especially for 22 instances in the same
> cgroup sharing all ancestors (so updating the same atomics).
> 
> (2) will-it-scale page_fault tests. These tests (specifically
> per_process_ops in page_fault3 test) detected a 25.9% regression before
> for a change in the stats update path [1]. These are the
> numbers from 10 runs (+ is good) on a machine with 256 cpus:
> 
>                LABEL            |     MEAN    |   MEDIAN    |   STDDEV   |
> ------------------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------
>   page_fault1_per_process_ops |             |             |            |
>   (A) base                    | 270249.164  | 265437.000  | 13451.836  |
>   (B) patched                 | 261368.709  | 255725.000  | 13394.767  |
>                               | -3.29%      | -3.66%      |            |
>   page_fault1_per_thread_ops  |             |             |            |
>   (A) base                    | 242111.345  | 239737.000  | 10026.031  |
>   (B) patched                 | 237057.109  | 235305.000  | 9769.687   |
>                               | -2.09%      | -1.85%      |            |
>   page_fault1_scalability     |             |             |
>   (A) base                    | 0.034387    | 0.035168    | 0.0018283  |
>   (B) patched                 | 0.033988    | 0.034573    | 0.0018056  |
>                               | -1.16%      | -1.69%      |            |
>   page_fault2_per_process_ops |             |             |
>   (A) base                    | 203561.836  | 203301.000  | 2550.764   |
>   (B) patched                 | 197195.945  | 197746.000  | 2264.263   |
>                               | -3.13%      | -2.73%      |            |
>   page_fault2_per_thread_ops  |             |             |
>   (A) base                    | 171046.473  | 170776.000  | 1509.679   |
>   (B) patched                 | 166626.327  | 166406.000  | 768.753    |
>                               | -2.58%      | -2.56%      |            |
>   page_fault2_scalability     |             |             |
>   (A) base                    | 0.054026    | 0.053821    | 0.00062121 |
>   (B) patched                 | 0.053329    | 0.05306     | 0.00048394 |
>                               | -1.29%      | -1.41%      |            |
>   page_fault3_per_process_ops |             |             |
>   (A) base                    | 1295807.782 | 1297550.000 | 5907.585   |
>   (B) patched                 | 1275579.873 | 1273359.000 | 8759.160   |
>                               | -1.56%      | -1.86%      |            |
>   page_fault3_per_thread_ops  |             |             |
>   (A) base                    | 391234.164  | 390860.000  | 1760.720   |
>   (B) patched                 | 377231.273  | 376369.000  | 1874.971   |
>                               | -3.58%      | -3.71%      |            |
>   page_fault3_scalability     |             |             |
>   (A) base                    | 0.60369     | 0.60072     | 0.0083029  |
>   (B) patched                 | 0.61733     | 0.61544     | 0.009855   |
>                               | +2.26%      | +2.45%      |            |
> 
> All regressions seem to be minimal, and within the normal variance for
> the benchmark. The fix for [1] assumes that 3% is noise -- and there were no
> further practical complaints), so hopefully this means that such variations
> in these microbenchmarks do not reflect on practical workloads.
> 
> (3) I also ran stress-ng in a nested cgroup and did not observe any
> obvious regressions.
> 
> [1]https://lore.kernel.org/all/20190520063534.GB19312@shao2-debian/