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Johannes Weiner authored
The reclaim code that balances between swapping and cache reclaim tries to predict likely reuse based on in-memory reference patterns alone. This works in many cases, but when it fails it cannot detect when the cache is thrashing pathologically, or when we're in the middle of a swap storm. The high seek cost of rotational drives under which the algorithm evolved also meant that mistakes could quickly result in lockups from too aggressive swapping (which is predominantly random IO). As a result, the balancing code has been tuned over time to a point where it mostly goes for page cache and defers swapping until the VM is under significant memory pressure. The resulting strategy doesn't make optimal caching decisions - where optimal is the least amount of IO required to execute the workload. The proliferation of fast random IO devices such as SSDs, in-memory compression such as zswap, and persistent memory technologies on the horizon, has made this undesirable behavior very noticable: Even in the presence of large amounts of cold anonymous memory and a capable swap device, the VM refuses to even seriously scan these pages, and can leave the page cache thrashing needlessly. This series sets out to address this. Since commit ("a528910e mm: thrash detection-based file cache sizing") we have exact tracking of refault IO - the ultimate cost of reclaiming the wrong pages. This allows us to use an IO cost based balancing model that is more aggressive about scanning anonymous memory when the cache is thrashing, while being able to avoid unnecessary swap storms. These patches base the LRU balance on the rate of refaults on each list, times the relative IO cost between swap device and filesystem (swappiness), in order to optimize reclaim for least IO cost incurred. History I floated these changes in 2016. At the time they were incomplete and full of workarounds due to a lack of infrastructure in the reclaim code: We didn't have PageWorkingset, we didn't have hierarchical cgroup statistics, and problems with the cgroup swap controller. As swapping wasn't too high a priority then, the patches stalled out. With all dependencies in place now, here we are again with much cleaner, feature-complete patches. I kept the acks for patches that stayed materially the same :-) Below is a series of test results that demonstrate certain problematic behavior of the current code, as well as showcase the new code's more predictable and appropriate balancing decisions. Test #1: No convergence This test shows an edge case where the VM currently doesn't converge at all on a new file workingset with a stale anon/tmpfs set. The test sets up a cold anon set the size of 3/4 RAM, then tries to establish a new file set half the size of RAM (flat access pattern). The vanilla kernel refuses to even scan anon pages and never converges. The file set is perpetually served from the filesystem. The first test kernel is with the series up to the workingset patch applied. This allows thrashing page cache to challenge the anonymous workingset. The VM then scans the lists based on the current scanned/rotated balancing algorithm. It converges on a stable state where all cold anon pages are pushed out and the fileset is served entirely from cache: noconverge/5.7-rc5-mm noconverge/5.7-rc5-mm-workingset Scanned 417719308.00 ( +0.00%) 64091155.00 ( -84.66%) Reclaimed 417711094.00 ( +0.00%) 61640308.00 ( -85.24%) Reclaim efficiency % 100.00 ( +0.00%) 96.18 ( -3.78%) Scanned file 417719308.00 ( +0.00%) 59211118.00 ( -85.83%) Scanned anon 0.00 ( +0.00%) 4880037.00 ( ) Swapouts 0.00 ( +0.00%) 2439957.00 ( ) Swapins 0.00 ( +0.00%) 257.00 ( ) Refaults 415246605.00 ( +0.00%) 59183722.00 ( -85.75%) Restore refaults 0.00 ( +0.00%) 54988252.00 ( ) The second test kernel is with the full patch series applied, which replaces the scanned/rotated ratios with refault/swapin rate-based balancing. It evicts the cold anon pages more aggressively in the presence of a thrashing cache and the absence of swapins, and so converges with about 60% of the IO and reclaim activity: noconverge/5.7-rc5-mm-workingset noconverge/5.7-rc5-mm-lrubalance Scanned 64091155.00 ( +0.00%) 37579741.00 ( -41.37%) Reclaimed 61640308.00 ( +0.00%) 35129293.00 ( -43.01%) Reclaim efficiency % 96.18 ( +0.00%) 93.48 ( -2.78%) Scanned file 59211118.00 ( +0.00%) 32708385.00 ( -44.76%) Scanned anon 4880037.00 ( +0.00%) 4871356.00 ( -0.18%) Swapouts 2439957.00 ( +0.00%) 2435565.00 ( -0.18%) Swapins 257.00 ( +0.00%) 262.00 ( +1.94%) Refaults 59183722.00 ( +0.00%) 32675667.00 ( -44.79%) Restore refaults 54988252.00 ( +0.00%) 28480430.00 ( -48.21%) We're triggering this case in host sideloading scenarios: When a host's primary workload is not saturating the machine (primary load is usually driven by user activity), we can optimistically sideload a batch job; if user activity picks up and the primary workload needs the whole host during this time, we freeze the sideload and rely on it getting pushed to swap. Frequently that swapping doesn't happen and the completely inactive sideload simply stays resident while the expanding primary worklad is struggling to gain ground. Test #2: Kernel build This test is a a kernel build that is slightly memory-restricted (make -j4 inside a 400M cgroup). Despite the very aggressive swapping of cold anon pages in test #1, this test shows that the new kernel carefully balances swap against cache refaults when both the file and the cache set are pressured. It shows the patched kernel to be slightly better at finding the coldest memory from the combined anon and file set to evict under pressure. The result is lower aggregate reclaim and paging activity: z 5.7-rc5-mm 5.7-rc5-mm-lrubalance Real time 210.60 ( +0.00%) 210.97 ( +0.18%) User time 745.42 ( +0.00%) 746.48 ( +0.14%) System time 69.78 ( +0.00%) 69.79 ( +0.02%) Scanned file 354682.00 ( +0.00%) 293661.00 ( -17.20%) Scanned anon 465381.00 ( +0.00%) 378144.00 ( -18.75%) Swapouts 185920.00 ( +0.00%) 147801.00 ( -20.50%) Swapins 34583.00 ( +0.00%) 32491.00 ( -6.05%) Refaults 212664.00 ( +0.00%) 172409.00 ( -18.93%) Restore refaults 48861.00 ( +0.00%) 80091.00 ( +63.91%) Total paging IO 433167.00 ( +0.00%) 352701.00 ( -18.58%) Test #3: Overload This next test is not about performance, but rather about the predictability of the algorithm. The current balancing behavior doesn't always lead to comprehensible results, which makes performance analysis and parameter tuning (swappiness e.g.) very difficult. The test shows the balancing behavior under equivalent anon and file input. Anon and file sets are created of equal size (3/4 RAM), have the same access patterns (a hot-cold gradient), and synchronized access rates. Swappiness is raised from the default of 60 to 100 to indicate equal IO cost between swap and cache. With the vanilla balancing code, anon scans make up around 9% of the total pages scanned, or a ~1:10 ratio. This is a surprisingly skewed ratio, and it's an outcome that is hard to explain given the input parameters to the VM. The new balancing model targets a 1:2 balance: All else being equal, reclaiming a file page costs one page IO - the refault; reclaiming an anon page costs two IOs - the swapout and the swapin. In the test we observe a ~1:3 balance. The scanned and paging IO numbers indicate that the anon LRU algorithm we have in place right now does a slightly worse job at picking the coldest pages compared to the file algorithm. There is ongoing work to improve this, like Joonsoo's anon workingset patches; however, it's difficult to compare the two aging strategies when the balancing between them is behaving unintuitively. The slightly less efficient anon reclaim results in a deviation from the optimal 1:2 scan ratio we would like to see here - however, 1:3 is much closer to what we'd want to see in this test than the vanilla kernel's aging of 10+ cache pages for every anonymous one: overload-100/5.7-rc5-mm-workingset overload-100/5.7-rc5-mm-lrubalance-realfile Scanned 533633725.00 ( +0.00%) 595687785.00 ( +11.63%) Reclaimed 494325440.00 ( +0.00%) 518154380.00 ( +4.82%) Reclaim efficiency % 92.63 ( +0.00%) 86.98 ( -6.03%) Scanned file 484532894.00 ( +0.00%) 456937722.00 ( -5.70%) Scanned anon 49100831.00 ( +0.00%) 138750063.00 ( +182.58%) Swapouts 8096423.00 ( +0.00%) 48982142.00 ( +504.98%) Swapins 10027384.00 ( +0.00%) 62325044.00 ( +521.55%) Refaults 479819973.00 ( +0.00%) 451309483.00 ( -5.94%) Restore refaults 426422087.00 ( +0.00%) 399914067.00 ( -6.22%) Total paging IO 497943780.00 ( +0.00%) 562616669.00 ( +12.99%) Test #4: Parallel IO It's important to note that these patches only affect the situation where the kernel has to reclaim workingset memory, which is usually a transitionary period. The vast majority of page reclaim occuring in a system is from trimming the ever-expanding page cache. These patches don't affect cache trimming behavior. We never swap as long as we only have use-once cache moving through the file LRU, we only consider swapping when the cache is actively thrashing. The following test demonstrates this. It has an anon workingset that takes up half of RAM and then writes a file that is twice the size of RAM out to disk. As the cache is funneled through the inactive file list, no anon pages are scanned (aside from apparently some background noise of 10 pages): 5.7-rc5-mm 5.7-rc5-mm-lrubalance Scanned 10714722.00 ( +0.00%) 10723445.00 ( +0.08%) Reclaimed 10703596.00 ( +0.00%) 10712166.00 ( +0.08%) Reclaim efficiency % 99.90 ( +0.00%) 99.89 ( -0.00%) Scanned file 10714722.00 ( +0.00%) 10723435.00 ( +0.08%) Scanned anon 0.00 ( +0.00%) 10.00 ( ) Swapouts 0.00 ( +0.00%) 7.00 ( ) Swapins 0.00 ( +0.00%) 0.00 ( +0.00%) Refaults 92.00 ( +0.00%) 41.00 ( -54.84%) Restore refaults 0.00 ( +0.00%) 0.00 ( +0.00%) Total paging IO 92.00 ( +0.00%) 48.00 ( -47.31%) This patch (of 14): Currently, THP are counted as single pages until they are split right before being swapped out. However, at that point the VM is already in the middle of reclaim, and adjusting the LRU balance then is useless. Always account THP by the number of basepages, and remove the fixup from the splitting path. Signed-off-by:
Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Signed-off-by:
Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Reviewed-by:
Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com> Reviewed-by:
Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> Acked-by:
Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Acked-by:
Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200520232525.798933-1-hannes@cmpxchg.org Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200520232525.798933-2-hannes@cmpxchg.orgSigned-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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