Re: [PATCH 5/5] mm: vmscan: move dirty pages out of the way until they're flushed

[Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 01:16:41PM -0500, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> We noticed a performance regression when moving hadoop workloads from
> 3.10 kernels to 4.0 and 4.6. This is accompanied by increased pageout
> activity initiated by kswapd as well as frequent bursts of allocation
> stalls and direct reclaim scans. Even lowering the dirty ratios to the
> equivalent of less than 1% of memory would not eliminate the issue,
> suggesting that dirty pages concentrate where the scanner is looking.
> 
> This can be traced back to recent efforts of thrash avoidance. Where
> 3.10 would not detect refaulting pages and continuously supply clean
> cache to the inactive list, a thrashing workload on 4.0+ will detect
> and activate refaulting pages right away, distilling used-once pages
> on the inactive list much more effectively. This is by design, and it
> makes sense for clean cache. But for the most part our workload's
> cache faults are refaults and its use-once cache is from streaming
> writes. We end up with most of the inactive list dirty, and we don't
> go after the active cache as long as we have use-once pages around.
> 
> But waiting for writes to avoid reclaiming clean cache that *might*
> refault is a bad trade-off. Even if the refaults happen, reads are
> faster than writes. Before getting bogged down on writeback, reclaim
> should first look at *all* cache in the system, even active cache.
> 
> To accomplish this, activate pages that have been dirty or under
> writeback for two inactive LRU cycles. We know at this point that
> there are not enough clean inactive pages left to satisfy memory
> demand in the system. The pages are marked for immediate reclaim,
> meaning they'll get moved back to the inactive LRU tail as soon as
> they're written back and become reclaimable. But in the meantime, by
> reducing the inactive list to only immediately reclaimable pages, we
> allow the scanner to deactivate and refill the inactive list with
> clean cache from the active list tail to guarantee forward progress.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>

Every patches look reasaonable to me.

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