Re: [PATCH 0/3] Reduce impact to overall system of SLUB using high-order allocations

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 16:29 +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> Debian (and probably Ubuntu) have recently have changed to the default
> option of SLUB. There are a few reports of people experiencing hangs
> when copying large amounts of data with kswapd using a large amount of
> CPU. It appears this is down to SLUB using high orders by default and
> the page allocator and reclaim struggling to keep up. The following
> three patches reduce the cost of using those high orders.
> 
> Patch 1 prevents kswapd waking up in response to SLUBs speculative
> 	use of high orders. This eliminates the hangs and while the
> 	system can still stall for long periods, it recovers.
> 
> Patch 2 further reduces the cost by prevent SLUB entering direct
> 	compaction or reclaim paths on the grounds that falling
> 	back to order-0 should be cheaper.
> 
> Patch 3 defaults SLUB to using order-0 on the grounds that the
> 	systems that heavily benefit from using high-order are also
> 	sized to fit in physical memory. On such systems, they should
> 	manually tune slub_max_order=3.
> 
> My own data on this is not great. I haven't really been able to
> reproduce the same problem locally but a significant failing is
> that the tests weren't stressing X but I couldn't make meaningful
> comparisons by just randomly clicking on things (working on fixing
> this problem).
> 
> The test case is simple. "download tar" wgets a large tar file and
> stores it locally. "unpack" is expanding it (15 times physical RAM
> in this case) and "delete source dirs" is the tarfile being deleted
> again. I also experimented with having the tar copied numerous times
> and into deeper directories to increase the size but the results were
> not particularly interesting so I left it as one tar.
> 
> Test server, 4 CPU threads (AMD Phenom), x86_64, 2G of RAM, no X running
>                              -       nowake    
>              largecopy-vanilla       kswapd-v1r1  noexstep-v1r1     default0-v1r1
> download tar           94 ( 0.00%)   94 ( 0.00%)   94 ( 0.00%)   93 ( 1.08%)
> unpack tar            521 ( 0.00%)  551 (-5.44%)  482 ( 8.09%)  488 ( 6.76%)
> delete source dirs    208 ( 0.00%)  218 (-4.59%)  194 ( 7.22%)  194 ( 7.22%)
> MMTests Statistics: duration
> User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds)        740.82    777.73    739.98    747.47
> Total Elapsed Time (seconds)               1046.66   1273.91    962.47    936.17
> 
> Disabling kswapd alone hurts performance slightly even though testers
> report it fixes hangs. I would guess it's because SLUB callers are
> calling direct reclaim more frequently (I belatedly noticed that
> compaction was disabled so it's not a factor) but haven't confirmed
> it. However, preventing kswapd waking or entering direct reclaim and
> having SLUB falling back to order-0 performed noticeably faster. Just
> using order-0 in the first place was fastest of all.
> 
> I tried running the same test on a test laptop but unfortunately
> due to a misconfiguration the results were lost. It would take a few
> hours to rerun so am posting without them.
> 
> If the testers verify this series help and we agree the patches are
> appropriate, they should be considered a stable candidate for 2.6.38.

OK, I confirm that I can't seem to break this one.  No hangs visible,
even when loading up the system with firefox, evolution, the usual
massive untar, X and even a distribution upgrade.

You can add my tested-by

James


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