Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] Hot page promotion optimization for large address space

[Bharata B Rao]

On 02-Apr-24 7:33 AM, Huang, Ying wrote:
> Bharata B Rao <bharata@xxxxxxx> writes:
> 
>> On 29-Mar-24 6:44 AM, Huang, Ying wrote:
>>> Bharata B Rao <bharata@xxxxxxx> writes:
>> <snip>
>>>> I don't think the pages are cold but rather the existing mechanism fails
>>>> to categorize them as hot. This is because the pages were scanned way
>>>> before the accesses start happening. When repeated accesses are made to
>>>> a chunk of memory that has been scanned a while back, none of those
>>>> accesses get classified as hot because the scan time is way behind
>>>> the current access time. That's the reason we are seeing the value
>>>> of latency ranging from 20s to 630s as shown above.
>>>
>>> If repeated accesses continue, the page will be identified as hot when
>>> it is scanned next time even if we don't expand the threshold range.  If
>>> the repeated accesses only last very short time, it makes little sense
>>> to identify the pages as hot.  Right?
>>
>> The total allocated memory here is 192G and the chunk size is 1G. Each
>> time one such 1G chunk is taken up randomly for generating memory accesses.
>> Within that 1G, 262144 random accesses are performed and 262144 such
>> accesses are repeated for 512 times. I thought that should be enough
>> to classify that chunk of memory as hot.
> 
> IIUC, some pages are accessed in very short time (maybe within 1ms).
> This isn't repeated access in a long period.  I think that pages
> accessed repeatedly in a long period are good candidates for promoting.
> But pages accessed frequently in only very short time aren't.

Here are the numbers for the 192nd chunk:

Each iteration of 262144 random accesses takes around ~10ms
512 such iterations are taking ~5s
numa_scan_seq is 16 when this chunk is accessed.
And no page promotions were done from this chunk. All the
time should_numa_migrate_memory() found the NUMA hint fault
latency to be higher than threshold.

Are these time periods considered too short for the pages
to be detected as hot and promoted?

> 
>> But as we see, often times
>> the scan time is lagging the access time by a large value.
>>
>> Let me instrument the code further to learn more insights (if possible)
>> about the scanning/fault time behaviors here.
>>
>> Leaving the fault count based threshold apart, do you think there is
>> value in updating the scan time for skipped pages/PTEs during every
>> scan so that the scan time remains current for all the pages?
> 
> No, I don't think so.  That makes hint page fault latency more
> inaccurate.

For the case that I have shown, depending on a old value of scan
time doesn't work well when pages get accessed after a long time
since scanning. At least with the scheme I show in patch 2/2,
probability of detecting pages as hot increases.

Regards,
Bharata.