Re: [net] 4890b686f4: netperf.Throughput_Mbps -69.4% regression

Eric Dumazet
2022-06-24T04:14:08Z

On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 3:57 AM Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2022 18:50:07 -0400 Xin Long wrote:
> > From the perf data, we can see __sk_mem_reduce_allocated() is the one
> > using CPU the most more than before, and mem_cgroup APIs are also
> > called in this function. It means the mem cgroup must be enabled in
> > the test env, which may explain why I couldn't reproduce it.
> >
> > The Commit 4890b686f4 ("net: keep sk->sk_forward_alloc as small as
> > possible") uses sk_mem_reclaim(checking reclaimable >= PAGE_SIZE) to
> > reclaim the memory, which is *more frequent* to call
> > __sk_mem_reduce_allocated() than before (checking reclaimable >=
> > SK_RECLAIM_THRESHOLD). It might be cheap when
> > mem_cgroup_sockets_enabled is false, but I'm not sure if it's still
> > cheap when mem_cgroup_sockets_enabled is true.
> >
> > I think SCTP netperf could trigger this, as the CPU is the bottleneck
> > for SCTP netperf testing, which is more sensitive to the extra
> > function calls than TCP.
> >
> > Can we re-run this testing without mem cgroup enabled?
>
> FWIW I defer to Eric, thanks a lot for double checking the report
> and digging in!

I did tests with TCP + memcg and noticed a very small additional cost
in memcg functions,
because of suboptimal layout:

Extract of an internal Google bug, update from June 9th:

--------------------------------
I have noticed a minor false sharing to fetch (struct
mem_cgroup)->css.parent, at offset 0xc0,
because it shares the cache line containing struct mem_cgroup.memory,
at offset 0xd0

Ideally, memcg->socket_pressure and memcg->parent should sit in a read
mostly cache line.
-----------------------

But nothing that could explain a "-69.4% regression"

memcg has a very similar strategy of per-cpu reserves, with
MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH being 32 pages per cpu.

It is not clear why SCTP with 10K writes would overflow this reserve constantly.

Presumably memcg experts will have to rework structure alignments to
make sure they can cope better
with more charge/uncharge operations, because we are not going back to
gigantic per-socket reserves,
this simply does not scale.