[PATCH v3] mm: swap: properly update readahead statistics in unuse_pte_range()

Andrea Righi
2020-04-16T18:01:39Z

In unuse_pte_range() we blindly swap-in pages without checking if the
swap entry is already present in the swap cache.

By doing this, the hit/miss ratio used by the swap readahead heuristic
is not properly updated and this leads to non-optimal performance during
swapoff.

Tracing the distribution of the readahead size returned by the swap
readahead heuristic during swapoff shows that a small readahead size is
used most of the time as if we had only misses (this happens both with
cluster and vma readahead), for example:

r::swapin_nr_pages(unsigned long offset):unsigned long:$retval
COUNT EVENT
36948 $retval = 8
44151 $retval = 4
49290 $retval = 1
527771 $retval = 2

Checking if the swap entry is present in the swap cache, instead, allows
to properly update the readahead statistics and the heuristic behaves in
a better way during swapoff, selecting a bigger readahead size:

r::swapin_nr_pages(unsigned long offset):unsigned long:$retval
COUNT EVENT
1618 $retval = 1
4960 $retval = 2
41315 $retval = 4
103521 $retval = 8

In terms of swapoff performance the result is the following:

Testing environment
===================

- Host:
CPU: 1.8GHz Intel Core i7-8565U (quad-core, 8MB cache)
HDD: PC401 NVMe SK hynix 512GB
MEM: 16GB

- Guest (kvm):
8GB of RAM
virtio block driver
16GB swap file on ext4 (/swapfile)

Test case
=========
- allocate 85% of memory
- `systemctl hibernate` to force all the pages to be swapped-out to the
swap file
- resume the system
- measure the time that swapoff takes to complete:
# /usr/bin/time swapoff /swapfile

Result (swapoff time)
======
5.6 vanilla 5.6 w/ this patch
----------- -----------------
cluster-readahead 22.09s 12.19s
vma-readahead 18.20s 15.33s

Signed-off-by: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
---
Changes in v3:
- properly update swap readahead statistics instead of forcing a
fixed-size readahead

mm/swapfile.c | 12 ++++++++----
1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/swapfile.c b/mm/swapfile.c
index 5871a2aa86a5..f8bf926c9c8f 100644
--- a/mm/swapfile.c
+++ b/mm/swapfile.c
@@ -1937,10 +1937,14 @@ static int unuse_pte_range(struct vm_area_struct *vma, pmd_t *pmd,

pte_unmap(pte);
swap_map = &si->swap_map[offset];
- vmf.vma = vma;
- vmf.address = addr;
- vmf.pmd = pmd;
- page = swapin_readahead(entry, GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE, &vmf);
+ page = lookup_swap_cache(entry, vma, addr);
+ if (!page) {
+ vmf.vma = vma;
+ vmf.address = addr;
+ vmf.pmd = pmd;
+ page = swapin_readahead(entry, GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE,
+ &vmf);
+ }
if (!page) {
if (*swap_map == 0 || *swap_map == SWAP_MAP_BAD)
goto try_next;
--
2.25.1