Re: [PATCH v2 00/39] Memory allocation profiling

Suren Baghdasaryan
2023-10-24T18:39:08Z

On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 11:29 AM Roman Gushchin
<roman.gushchin@linux.dev> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 06:45:57AM -0700, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
> > Updates since the last version [1]
> > - Simplified allocation tagging macros;
> > - Runtime enable/disable sysctl switch (/proc/sys/vm/mem_profiling)
> > instead of kernel command-line option;
> > - CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING_BY_DEFAULT to select default enable state;
> > - Changed the user-facing API from debugfs to procfs (/proc/allocinfo);
> > - Removed context capture support to make patch incremental;
> > - Renamed uninstrumented allocation functions to use _noprof suffix;
> > - Added __GFP_LAST_BIT to make the code cleaner;
> > - Removed lazy per-cpu counters; it turned out the memory savings was
> > minimal and not worth the performance impact;
>
> Hello Suren,
>
> > Performance overhead:
> > To evaluate performance we implemented an in-kernel test executing
> > multiple get_free_page/free_page and kmalloc/kfree calls with allocation
> > sizes growing from 8 to 240 bytes with CPU frequency set to max and CPU
> > affinity set to a specific CPU to minimize the noise. Below is performance
> > comparison between the baseline kernel, profiling when enabled, profiling
> > when disabled and (for comparison purposes) baseline with
> > CONFIG_MEMCG_KMEM enabled and allocations using __GFP_ACCOUNT:
> >
> > kmalloc pgalloc
> > (1 baseline) 12.041s 49.190s
> > (2 default disabled) 14.970s (+24.33%) 49.684s (+1.00%)
> > (3 default enabled) 16.859s (+40.01%) 56.287s (+14.43%)
> > (4 runtime enabled) 16.983s (+41.04%) 55.760s (+13.36%)
> > (5 memcg) 33.831s (+180.96%) 51.433s (+4.56%)
>
> some recent changes [1] to the kmem accounting should have made it quite a bit
> faster. Would be great if you can provide new numbers for the comparison.
> Maybe with the next revision?
>
> And btw thank you (and Kent): your numbers inspired me to do this kmemcg
> performance work. I expect it still to be ~twice more expensive than your
> stuff because on the memcg side we handle separately charge and statistics,
> but hopefully the difference will be lower.

Yes, I saw them! Well done! I'll definitely update my numbers once the
patches land in their final form.

>
> Thank you!

Thank you for the optimizations!

>
> [1]:
> patches from next tree, so no stable hashes:
> mm: kmem: reimplement get_obj_cgroup_from_current()
> percpu: scoped objcg protection
> mm: kmem: scoped objcg protection
> mm: kmem: make memcg keep a reference to the original objcg
> mm: kmem: add direct objcg pointer to task_struct
> mm: kmem: optimize get_obj_cgroup_from_current()