Re: [PATCH mm-new v2] mm/memcontrol: Flush stats when write stat file

[JP Kobryn]

On 11/5/25 7:30 PM, Leon Huang Fu wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 6, 2025 at 9:19 AM Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > +Yosry, JP
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 05, 2025 at 03:49:16PM +0800, Leon Huang Fu wrote:
> > > On high-core count systems, memory cgroup statistics can become stale
> > > due to per-CPU caching and deferred aggregation. Monitoring tools and
> > > management applications sometimes need guaranteed up-to-date statistics
> > > at specific points in time to make accurate decisions.
> >
> > Can you explain a bit more on your environment where you are seeing
> > stale stats? More specifically, how often the management applications
> > are reading the memcg stats and if these applications are reading memcg
> > stats for each nodes of the cgroup tree.
> >
> > We force flush all the memcg stats at root level every 2 seconds but it
> > seems like that is not enough for your case. I am fine with an explicit
> > way for users to flush the memcg stats. In that way only users who want
> > to has to pay for the flush cost.
>
> Thanks for the feedback. I encountered this issue while running the LTP
> memcontrol02 test case [1] on a 256-core server with the 6.6.y kernel on XFS,
> where it consistently failed.
>
> I was aware that Yosry had improved the memory statistics refresh mechanism
> in "mm: memcg: subtree stats flushing and thresholds" [2], so I attempted to
> backport that patchset to 6.6.y [3]. However, even on the 6.15.0-061500-generic
> kernel with those improvements, the test still fails intermittently on XFS.

I'm not against this change, but it might be worth testing on a 6.16 or
later kernel. There were some changes that could affect your
measurements. One is that flushing was isolated to individual subsystems
[0] and the other is that updating stats became lockless [1].

[0] 
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/kernel/cgroup/rstat.c?h=v6.18-rc4&id=5da3bfa029d6809e192d112f39fca4dbe0137aaf
[1] 
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/kernel/cgroup/rstat.c?h=v6.18-rc4&id=36df6e3dbd7e7b074e55fec080012184e2fa3a46