Re: [PATCH 0/7] mm/zswap: optimize the scalability of zswap rb-tree

[Nhat Pham]

On Wed, Dec 6, 2023 at 1:46 AM Chengming Zhou
<zhouchengming@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> When testing the zswap performance by using kernel build -j32 in a tmpfs
> directory, I found the scalability of zswap rb-tree is not good, which
> is protected by the only spinlock. That would cause heavy lock contention
> if multiple tasks zswap_store/load concurrently.
>
> So a simple solution is to split the only one zswap rb-tree into multiple
> rb-trees, each corresponds to SWAP_ADDRESS_SPACE_PAGES (64M). This idea is
> from the commit 4b3ef9daa4fc ("mm/swap: split swap cache into 64MB trunks").
>
> Although this method can't solve the spinlock contention completely, it
> can mitigate much of that contention.

By how much? Do you have any stats to estimate the amount of
contention and the reduction by this patch?

I do think lock contention could be a problem here, and it will be
even worse with the zswap shrinker enabled (which introduces an
theoretically unbounded number of concurrent reclaimers hammering on
the zswap rbtree and its lock). I am generally a bit weary about
architectural change though, especially if it is just a bandaid. We
have tried to reduce the lock contention somewhere else (multiple
zpools), and as predicted it just shifts the contention point
elsewhere. Maybe we need a deeper architectural re-think.

Not an outright NACK of course - just food for thought.

>
> Another problem when testing the zswap using our default zsmalloc is that
> zswap_load() and zswap_writeback_entry() have to malloc a temporary memory
> to support !zpool_can_sleep_mapped().
>
> Optimize it by reusing the percpu crypto_acomp_ctx->dstmem, which is also
> used by zswap_store() and protected by the same percpu crypto_acomp_ctx->mutex.

It'd be nice to reduce the (temporary) memory allocation on these
paths, but would this introduce contention on the per-cpu dstmem and
the mutex that protects it, if there are too many concurrent
store/load/writeback requests?