When file refaults are detected and there are many inactive file pages,
the system never reclaim anonymous pages, the file pages are dropped
aggressively when there are still a lot of cold anonymous pages and
system thrashes.  This issue impacts the performance of applications
with large executable, e.g.  chrome.

With this patch, when file refault is detected, inactive_list_is_low()
always returns true for file pages in get_scan_count() to enable
scanning anonymous pages.

The problem can be reproduced by the following test program.

---8<---
void fallocate_file(const char *filename, off_t size)
{
	struct stat st;
	int fd;

	if (!stat(filename, &st) && st.st_size >= size)
		return;

	fd = open(filename, O_WRONLY | O_CREAT, 0600);
	if (fd < 0) {
		perror("create file");
		exit(1);
	}
	if (posix_fallocate(fd, 0, size)) {
		perror("fallocate");
		exit(1);
	}
	close(fd);
}

long *alloc_anon(long size)
{
	long *start = malloc(size);
	memset(start, 1, size);
	return start;
}

long access_file(const char *filename, long size, long rounds)
{
	int fd, i;
	volatile char *start1, *end1, *start2;
	const int page_size = getpagesize();
	long sum = 0;

	fd = open(filename, O_RDONLY);
	if (fd == -1) {
		perror("open");
		exit(1);
	}

	/*
	 * Some applications, e.g. chrome, use a lot of executable file
	 * pages, map some of the pages with PROT_EXEC flag to simulate
	 * the behavior.
	 */
	start1 = mmap(NULL, size / 2, PROT_READ | PROT_EXEC, MAP_SHARED,
		      fd, 0);
	if (start1 == MAP_FAILED) {
		perror("mmap");
		exit(1);
	}
	end1 = start1 + size / 2;

	start2 = mmap(NULL, size / 2, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, fd, size / 2);
	if (start2 == MAP_FAILED) {
		perror("mmap");
		exit(1);
	}

	for (i = 0; i < rounds; ++i) {
		struct timeval before, after;
		volatile char *ptr1 = start1, *ptr2 = start2;
		gettimeofday(&before, NULL);
		for (; ptr1 < end1; ptr1 += page_size, ptr2 += page_size)
			sum += *ptr1 + *ptr2;
		gettimeofday(&after, NULL);
		printf("File access time, round %d: %f (sec)
", i,
		       (after.tv_sec - before.tv_sec) +
		       (after.tv_usec - before.tv_usec) / 1000000.0);
	}
	return sum;
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
	const long MB = 1024 * 1024;
	long anon_mb, file_mb, file_rounds;
	const char filename[] = "large";
	long *ret1;
	long ret2;

	if (argc != 4) {
		printf("usage: thrash ANON_MB FILE_MB FILE_ROUNDS
");
		exit(0);
	}
	anon_mb = atoi(argv[1]);
	file_mb = atoi(argv[2]);
	file_rounds = atoi(argv[3]);

	fallocate_file(filename, file_mb * MB);
	printf("Allocate %ld MB anonymous pages
", anon_mb);
	ret1 = alloc_anon(anon_mb * MB);
	printf("Access %ld MB file pages
", file_mb);
	ret2 = access_file(filename, file_mb * MB, file_rounds);
	printf("Print result to prevent optimization: %ld
",
	       *ret1 + ret2);
	return 0;
}
---8<---

Running the test program on 2GB RAM VM with kernel 5.2.0-rc5, the program
fills ram with 2048 MB memory, access a 200 MB file for 10 times.  Without
this patch, the file cache is dropped aggresively and every access to the
file is from disk.

  $ ./thrash 2048 200 10
  Allocate 2048 MB anonymous pages
  Access 200 MB file pages
  File access time, round 0: 2.489316 (sec)
  File access time, round 1: 2.581277 (sec)
  File access time, round 2: 2.487624 (sec)
  File access time, round 3: 2.449100 (sec)
  File access time, round 4: 2.420423 (sec)
  File access time, round 5: 2.343411 (sec)
  File access time, round 6: 2.454833 (sec)
  File access time, round 7: 2.483398 (sec)
  File access time, round 8: 2.572701 (sec)
  File access time, round 9: 2.493014 (sec)

With this patch, these file pages can be cached.

  $ ./thrash 2048 200 10
  Allocate 2048 MB anonymous pages
  Access 200 MB file pages
  File access time, round 0: 2.475189 (sec)
  File access time, round 1: 2.440777 (sec)
  File access time, round 2: 2.411671 (sec)
  File access time, round 3: 1.955267 (sec)
  File access time, round 4: 0.029924 (sec)
  File access time, round 5: 0.000808 (sec)
  File access time, round 6: 0.000771 (sec)
  File access time, round 7: 0.000746 (sec)
  File access time, round 8: 0.000738 (sec)
  File access time, round 9: 0.000747 (sec)

Checked the swap out stats during the test [1], 19006 pages swapped out
with this patch, 3418 pages swapped out without this patch. There are
more swap out, but I think it's within reasonable range when file backed
data set doesn't fit into the memory.

$ ./thrash 2000 100 2100 5 1 # ANON_MB FILE_EXEC FILE_NOEXEC ROUNDS
PROCESSES Allocate 2000 MB anonymous pages active_anon: 1613644,
inactive_anon: 348656, active_file: 892, inactive_file: 1384 (kB)
pswpout: 7972443, pgpgin: 478615246 Access 100 MB executable file pages
Access 2100 MB regular file pages File access time, round 0: 12.165,
(sec) active_anon: 1433788, inactive_anon: 478116, active_file: 17896,
inactive_file: 24328 (kB) File access time, round 1: 11.493, (sec)
active_anon: 1430576, inactive_anon: 477144, active_file: 25440,
inactive_file: 26172 (kB) File access time, round 2: 11.455, (sec)
active_anon: 1427436, inactive_anon: 476060, active_file: 21112,
inactive_file: 28808 (kB) File access time, round 3: 11.454, (sec)
active_anon: 1420444, inactive_anon: 473632, active_file: 23216,
inactive_file: 35036 (kB) File access time, round 4: 11.479, (sec)
active_anon: 1413964, inactive_anon: 471460, active_file: 31728,
inactive_file: 32224 (kB) pswpout: 7991449 (+ 19006), pgpgin: 489924366
(+ 11309120)

With 4 processes accessing non-overlapping parts of a large file, 30316
pages swapped out with this patch, 5152 pages swapped out without this
patch.  The swapout number is small comparing to pgpgin.

[1]: https://github.com/vovo/testing/blob/master/mem_thrash.c

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190701081038.GA83398@google.com
Fixes: e9868505 ("mm,vmscan: only evict file pages when we have plenty")
Fixes: 7c5bd705 ("mm: memcg: only evict file pages when we have plenty")
Signed-off-by: Kuo-Hsin Yang <vovoy@chromium.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@chromium.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>	[4.12+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>