Re: [PATCH] mm: zsmalloc: share slab caches for all zsmalloc zpools

From: Sergey Senozhatsky
Date: Tue Jun 04 2024 - 22:17:13 EST


On (24/06/04 17:53), Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> Zswap creates multiple zpools to improve concurrency. Each zsmalloc
> zpool creates its own 'zs_handle' and 'zspage' slab caches. Currently we
> end up with 32 slab caches of each type.
>
> Since each slab cache holds some free objects, we end up with a lot of
> free objects distributed among the separate zpool caches. Slab caches
> are designed to handle concurrent allocations by using percpu
> structures, so having a single instance of each cache should be enough,
> and avoids wasting more memory than needed due to fragmentation.
>
> Additionally, having more slab caches than needed unnecessarily slows
> down code paths that iterate slab_caches.
>
> In the results reported by Eric in [1], the amount of unused slab memory
> in these caches goes down from 242808 bytes to 29216 bytes (-88%). This
> is calculated by (num_objs - active_objs) * objsize for each 'zs_handle'
> and 'zspage' cache. Although this patch did not help with the allocation
> failure reported by Eric with zswap + zsmalloc, I think it is still
> worth merging on its own.
>
> [1]https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240604134458.3ae4396a@yea/
>
> Signed-off-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx>

Makes perfect sense, thanks.

Reviewed-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>