Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm/readahead: limit sync readahead while too many active refault

[Jan Kara]

 On Thu 01-02-24 18:41:30, Liu Shixin wrote:
> On 2024/2/1 17:37, Jan Kara wrote:
> > On Thu 01-02-24 18:08:35, Liu Shixin wrote:
> >> When the pagefault is not for write and the refault distance is close,
> >> the page will be activated directly. If there are too many such pages in
> >> a file, that means the pages may be reclaimed immediately.
> >> In such situation, there is no positive effect to read-ahead since it will
> >> only waste IO. So collect the number of such pages and when the number is
> >> too large, stop bothering with read-ahead for a while until it decreased
> >> automatically.
> >>
> >> Define 'too large' as 10000 experientially, which can solves the problem
> >> and does not affect by the occasional active refault.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Liu Shixin <liushixin2@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > So I'm not convinced this new logic is needed. We already have
> > ra->mmap_miss which gets incremented when a page fault has to read the page
> > (and decremented when a page fault found the page already in cache). This
> > should already work to detect trashing as well, shouldn't it? If it does
> > not, why?
> >
> > 								Honza
> ra->mmap_miss doesn't help, it increased only one in do_sync_mmap_readahead()
> and then decreased one for every page in filemap_map_pages(). So in this scenario,
> it can't exceed MMAP_LOTSAMISS.

I see, OK. But that's a (longstanding) bug in how mmap_miss is handled. Can
you please test whether attached patches fix the trashing for you? At least
now I can see mmap_miss properly increments when we are hitting uncached
pages...  Thanks!

								Honza

-- 
Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxxx>
SUSE Labs, CR