Re: [PATCH v6 16/16] mm: zswap: Fix for zstd performance regression with 2M folios.

[Yosry Ahmed]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2025 at 11:21:02PM -0800, Kanchana P Sridhar wrote:
> With the previous patch that enables support for batch compressions in
> zswap_compress_folio(), a 6.2% throughput regression was seen with zstd and
> 2M folios, using vm-scalability/usemem.
> 
> For compressors that don't support batching, this was root-caused to the
> following zswap_store_folio() structure:
> 
>  Batched stores:
>  ---------------
>  - Allocate all entries,
>  - Compress all entries,
>  - Store all entries in xarray/LRU.
> 
> Hence, the above structure is maintained only for batched stores, and the
> following structure is implemented for sequential stores of large folio pages,
> that fixes the zstd regression, while preserving common code paths for batched
> and sequential stores of a folio:
> 
>  Sequential stores:
>  ------------------
>  For each page in folio:
>   - allocate an entry,
>   - compress the page,
>   - store the entry in xarray/LRU.
> 
> This is submitted as a separate patch only for code review purposes. I will
> squash this with the previous commit in subsequent versions of this
> patch-series.

Could it be the cache locality?

I wonder if we should do what Chengming initially suggested and batch
everything at ZSWAP_MAX_BATCH_SIZE instead. Instead of
zswap_compress_folio() operating on the entire folio, we can operate on
batches of size ZSWAP_MAX_BATCH_SIZE, regardless of whether the
underlying compressor supports batching.

If we do this, instead of:
- Allocate all entries
- Compress all entries
- Store all entries

We can do:
  - For each batch (8 entries)
  	- Allocate all entries
	- Compress all entries
	- Store all entries

This should help unify the code, and I suspect it may also fix the zstd
regression. We can also skip the entries array allocation and use one on
the stack.