Re: [PATCH 6/6] mm/vmscan: Don't mess with pgdat->flags in memcg reclaim.

Michal Hocko
2018-03-20T15:29:03Z

On Thu 15-03-18 19:45:53, Andrey Ryabinin wrote:
> memcg reclaim may alter pgdat->flags based on the state of LRU lists
> in cgroup and its children. PGDAT_WRITEBACK may force kswapd to sleep
> congested_wait(), PGDAT_DIRTY may force kswapd to writeback filesystem
> pages. But the worst here is PGDAT_CONGESTED, since it may force all
> direct reclaims to stall in wait_iff_congested(). Note that only kswapd
> have powers to clear any of these bits. This might just never happen if
> cgroup limits configured that way. So all direct reclaims will stall
> as long as we have some congested bdi in the system.
>
> Leave all pgdat->flags manipulations to kswapd. kswapd scans the whole
> pgdat, so it's reasonable to leave all decisions about node stat
> to kswapd. Also add per-cgroup congestion state to avoid needlessly
> burning CPU in cgroup reclaim if heavy congestion is observed.
>
> Currently there is no need in per-cgroup PGDAT_WRITEBACK and PGDAT_DIRTY
> bits since they alter only kswapd behavior.
>
> The problem could be easily demonstrated by creating heavy congestion
> in one cgroup:
>
> echo "+memory" > /sys/fs/cgroup/cgroup.subtree_control
> mkdir -p /sys/fs/cgroup/congester
> echo 512M > /sys/fs/cgroup/congester/memory.max
> echo $$ > /sys/fs/cgroup/congester/cgroup.procs
> /* generate a lot of diry data on slow HDD */
> while true; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sdb/zeroes bs=1M count=1024; done &
> ....
> while true; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sdb/zeroes bs=1M count=1024; done &
>
> and some job in another cgroup:
>
> mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/victim
> echo 128M > /sys/fs/cgroup/victim/memory.max
>
> # time cat /dev/sda > /dev/null
> real 10m15.054s
> user 0m0.487s
> sys 1m8.505s
>
> According to the tracepoint in wait_iff_congested(), the 'cat' spent 50%
> of the time sleeping there.
>
> With the patch, cat don't waste time anymore:
>
> # time cat /dev/sda > /dev/null
> real 5m32.911s
> user 0m0.411s
> sys 0m56.664s
>
> Signed-off-by: Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@virtuozzo.com>
> ---
> include/linux/backing-dev.h | 2 +-
> include/linux/memcontrol.h | 2 ++
> mm/backing-dev.c | 19 ++++------
> mm/vmscan.c | 84 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------
> 4 files changed, 70 insertions(+), 37 deletions(-)

This patch seems overly complicated. Why don't you simply reduce the whole
pgdat_flags handling to global_reclaim()?

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs