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  • * Re: [patch 0/8] slub: Fallback to order 0 and variable order slab support
           [not found] <20080229044803.482012397@sgi.com>
                       ` (3 preceding siblings ...)
           [not found] ` <20080229044818.999367120@sgi.com>
    @ 2008-03-04 12:20 ` Mel Gorman
      2008-03-04 18:53   ` Christoph Lameter
      2008-03-04 19:01   ` Matt Mackall
      4 siblings, 2 replies; 26+ messages in thread
    From: Mel Gorman @ 2008-03-04 12:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
      To: Christoph Lameter; +Cc: Pekka Enberg, Matt Mackall, linux-mm
    
    On (28/02/08 20:48), Christoph Lameter didst pronounce:
    > This is the patchset that was posted two weeks ago modified according
    > to the feedback that Pekka gave. I would like to put these patches
    > into mm.
    > 
    
    I haven't reviewed the patches properly but I put them through a quick test
    against 2.6.25-rc3 to see what the performnace was like and the superpage
    allocation success rates were like. Performance wise, it looked like
    
    				Loss	to	Gain
    Kernbench Elapsed time		 -0.64%		0.32%
    Kernbench Total time		 -0.61%		0.48%
    Hackbench sockets-12 clients	 -2.95%		5.13%
    Hackbench pipes-12 clients	-16.95%		9.27%
    TBench 4 clients		 -1.98%		8.2%
    DBench 4 clients (ext2)		 -5.9%		7.99%
    
    So, running with the high orders is not a clear-cut win to my eyes. What
    did you test to show that it was a general win justifying a high-order by
    default? From looking through, tbench seems to be the only obvious one to
    gain but the rest, it is not clear at all. I'll try give sysbench a spin
    later to see if it is clear-cut.
    
    However, in *all* cases, superpage allocations were less successful and in
    some cases it was severely regressed (one machine went from 81% success rate
    to 36%). Sufficient statistics are not gathered to see why this happened
    in retrospect but my suspicion would be that high-order RECLAIMABLE and
    UNMOVABLE slub allocations routinely fall back to the less fragmented
    MOVABLE pageblocks with these patches - something that is normally a very
    rare event. This change in assumption hurts fragmentation avoidance and
    chances are the long-term behaviour of these patches is not great.
    
    If this guess is correct, using a high-order size by default is a bad plan
    and it should only be set when it is known that the target workload benefits
    and superpage allocations are not a concern. Alternative, set high-order by
    default only for a limited number of caches that are RECLAIMABLE (or better
    yet ones we know can be directly reclaimed with the slub-defrag patches).
    
    As it is, this is painful from a fragmentation perspective and the
    performance win is not clear-cut.
    
    > This patchset makes slub capable of handling arbitrary sizes of pages.
    > This means that a slab cache that currently uses order 1 because of
    > packing density issues can fallback to order 0 allocations if memory
    > becomes fragmented. All allocations for objects <= PAGE_SIZE can fall
    > back like that. So a single slab may contain various sizes of pages
    > that may contain more or less objects.
    > 
    > On the other hand it also enables slub to use larger page orders by
    > default since it is now no problem to fall back to an order 0 alloc.
    > The default max order is set to 4 which means that 64K compound pages
    > can beused in some situations for large objects that do not fit into smaller
    > pages. This in turn increases the number of times slub can use its
    > fastpath before a fallback to the page allocator has to occur.
    > 
    > The patchset realizes the initial intend of providing a feature
    > comparable with the per cpu queue size in slab. The order for
    > each slab cache can be configured from user space while the system
    > is running. Increasing the default allocation order can be used to
    > tune slub like slab.
    > 
    > The allocated sizes can then also be effectively controlled via boot
    > parameters (slub_min_order and slub_max_order).
    > 
    > The patchset is also available via git
    > 
    > git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/christoph/vm.git slab-mm
    > 
    
    -- 
    Mel Gorman
    Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
    University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab
    
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    ^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 26+ messages in thread

  • end of thread, other threads:[~2008-03-07 19:50 UTC | newest]
    
    Thread overview: 26+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
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         [not found] <20080229044803.482012397@sgi.com>
         [not found] ` <20080229044820.044485187@sgi.com>
    2008-02-29  8:13   ` [patch 7/8] slub: Make the order configurable for each slab cache Pekka Enberg
    2008-02-29 19:37     ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-01  9:47       ` Pekka Enberg
    2008-03-03 17:49         ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-03 22:56           ` Pekka Enberg
    2008-03-03 23:36             ` Christoph Lameter
         [not found] ` <20080229044820.298792748@sgi.com>
    2008-02-29  8:13   ` [patch 8/8] slub: Simplify any_slab_object checks Pekka Enberg
         [not found] ` <20080229044819.800974712@sgi.com>
    2008-02-29  8:19   ` [patch 6/8] slub: Adjust order boundaries and minimum objects per slab Pekka Enberg
    2008-02-29 19:41     ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-01  9:58       ` Pekka J Enberg
    2008-03-03 17:52         ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-03 21:34           ` Matt Mackall
    2008-03-03 22:36             ` Christoph Lameter
         [not found] ` <20080229044818.999367120@sgi.com>
    2008-02-29  8:59   ` [patch 3/8] slub: Update statistics handling for variable order slabs Pekka Enberg
    2008-02-29 19:43     ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-01 10:29   ` Pekka Enberg
    2008-03-04 12:20 ` [patch 0/8] slub: Fallback to order 0 and variable order slab support Mel Gorman
    2008-03-04 18:53   ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-05 18:28     ` Mel Gorman
    2008-03-05 18:52       ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-06 22:04         ` Mel Gorman
    2008-03-06 22:18           ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-07 12:17             ` Mel Gorman
    2008-03-07 19:50               ` Christoph Lameter
    2008-03-04 19:01   ` Matt Mackall
    2008-03-05  0:04     ` Christoph Lameter
    

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