RE: la la la la ... swappiness

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

Reformatted as plain text.

________________________________________
From: Aucoin [mailto:Aucoin@Houston.RR.com] 
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 12:17 AM
To: 'akpm@osdl.org'; 'torvalds@osdl.org'; 'linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org';
'clameter@sgi.com'
Subject: la la la la ... swappiness

I set swappiness to zero and it doesn't do what I want!

I have a system that runs as a Linux based data server 24x7 and occasionally
I need to apply an update or patch. It's a BIIIG patch to the tune of
several hundred megabytes, let's say 600MB for a good round number. The
server software itself runs on very tight memory boundaries, I've
preallocated a large chunk of memory that is shared amongst several
processes as a form of application cache, there is barely 15% spare memory
floating around.

The update is delivered to the server as a tar file. In order to minimize
down time I untar this update and verify the contents landed correctly
before switching over to the updated software.

The problem is when I attempt to untar the payload disk I/O starts caching,
the inactive page count reels wildly out of control, the system starts
swapping, OOM fires and there goes my 4 9's uptime. My system just suffered
a catastrophic failure because I can't control pagecache due to disk I/O.
I need a pagecache throttle, what do you suggest?

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Andrew Morton]

> On Sun, 3 Dec 2006 00:16:38 -0600 "Aucoin" <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:
> I set swappiness to zero and it doesn't do what I want!
> 
> I have a system that runs as a Linux based data server 24x7 and occasionally
> I need to apply an update or patch. It's a BIIIG patch to the tune of
> several hundred megabytes, let's say 600MB for a good round number. The
> server software itself runs on very tight memory boundaries, I've
> preallocated a large chunk of memory that is shared amongst several
> processes as a form of application cache, there is barely 15% spare memory
> floating around.
> 
> The update is delivered to the server as a tar file. In order to minimize
> down time I untar this update and verify the contents landed correctly
> before switching over to the updated software.
> 
> The problem is when I attempt to untar the payload disk I/O starts caching,
> the inactive page count reels wildly out of control, the system starts
> swapping, OOM fires and there goes my 4 9's uptime. My system just suffered
> a catastrophic failure because I can't control pagecache due to disk I/O.

kernel version?

> I need a pagecache throttle, what do you suggest?

Don't set swappiness to zero...   Leaving it at the default should avoid
the oom-killer.

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

Thanks for the reply! I'll buy one of your books!

2.6.16.28 SMP

The application is an "embedded", headless system and we've pretty much laid
memory out the way we want it, the only rogue player is the tar update
process. A little bit of swapping is fine but enough swapping to irritate
OOM is not desireable. Yes, the swap is only 500MB but this is a purpose
built system, there are no random user apps started and stopped so
absolutely nothing swaps until the update process runs.

Here's meminfo from an idle system, on a loaded system the machine locks up
now since I've disabled OOM trying to prevent the imminent crash. I got
desperate and not only set swappiness to zero but I've also tried setting
the dirty ratios down as low as 1, the centisecs as low as 1 and cache
pressure as high as 9999. I'm thrashing and running out of dials to turn.

With the ridiculous settings above dirty pages porpoise between 0-20K, with
more reasonable settings they porpoise between 10-40K but it seems to be the
inactive page count that is killing me.

before tar extraction
MemTotal:      2075152 kB
MemFree:        502916 kB
Buffers:          2272 kB
Cached:           7180 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         118792 kB
Inactive:         1648 kB
HighTotal:     1179392 kB
HighFree:         3040 kB
LowTotal:       895760 kB
LowFree:        499876 kB
SwapTotal:      524276 kB
SwapFree:       524276 kB
Dirty:               0 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:         116720 kB
Slab:            27956 kB
CommitLimit:    557376 kB
Committed_AS:   903912 kB
PageTables:       1340 kB
VmallocTotal:   114680 kB
VmallocUsed:      1000 kB
VmallocChunk:   113584 kB
HugePages_Total:   345
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB

during tar extraction ... inactive pages reaches levels as high as ~375000
MemTotal:      2075152 kB
MemFree:        256316 kB
Buffers:          2944 kB
Cached:         247228 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         159652 kB
Inactive:       201608 kB
HighTotal:     1179392 kB
HighFree:         1652 kB
LowTotal:       895760 kB
LowFree:        254664 kB
SwapTotal:      524276 kB
SwapFree:       523932 kB
Dirty:           16068 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:         116952 kB
Slab:            34864 kB
CommitLimit:    557376 kB
Committed_AS:   904196 kB
PageTables:       1352 kB
VmallocTotal:   114680 kB
VmallocUsed:      1000 kB
VmallocChunk:   113584 kB
HugePages_Total:   345
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB

even after the tar has been complete for a couple minutes.
MemTotal:      2075152 kB
MemFree:        169848 kB
Buffers:          4360 kB
Cached:         334824 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         178692 kB
Inactive:       271452 kB
HighTotal:     1179392 kB
HighFree:         1652 kB
LowTotal:       895760 kB
LowFree:        168196 kB
SwapTotal:      524276 kB
SwapFree:       523932 kB
Dirty:               0 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:         116716 kB
Slab:            31868 kB
CommitLimit:    557376 kB
Committed_AS:   903908 kB
PageTables:       1340 kB
VmallocTotal:   114680 kB
VmallocUsed:      1000 kB
VmallocChunk:   113584 kB
HugePages_Total:   345
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Morton [mailto:akpm@osdl.org] 
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 2:09 AM
To: Aucoin@Houston.RR.com
Cc: torvalds@osdl.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; clameter@sgi.com
Subject: Re: la la la la ... swappiness

> On Sun, 3 Dec 2006 00:16:38 -0600 "Aucoin" <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:
> I set swappiness to zero and it doesn't do what I want!
> 
> I have a system that runs as a Linux based data server 24x7 and
occasionally
> I need to apply an update or patch. It's a BIIIG patch to the tune of
> several hundred megabytes, let's say 600MB for a good round number. The
> server software itself runs on very tight memory boundaries, I've
> preallocated a large chunk of memory that is shared amongst several
> processes as a form of application cache, there is barely 15% spare memory
> floating around.
> 
> The update is delivered to the server as a tar file. In order to minimize
> down time I untar this update and verify the contents landed correctly
> before switching over to the updated software.
> 
> The problem is when I attempt to untar the payload disk I/O starts
caching,
> the inactive page count reels wildly out of control, the system starts
> swapping, OOM fires and there goes my 4 9's uptime. My system just
suffered
> a catastrophic failure because I can't control pagecache due to disk I/O.

kernel version?

> I need a pagecache throttle, what do you suggest?

Don't set swappiness to zero...   Leaving it at the default should avoid
the oom-killer.

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Tim Schmielau]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Aucoin wrote:

> during tar extraction ... inactive pages reaches levels as high as ~375000

So why do you want the system to swap _less_? You need to find some free 
memory for the additional processes to run in, and you have lots of 
inactive pages, so I think you want to swap out _more_ pages.

I'd suggest to temporarily add a swapfile before you update your system. 
This can even help in bringing your memory use to the state before if you 
do it like this
  - swapon additional swapfile
  - update your database software
  - swapoff swap partition
  - swapon swap partition
  - swapoff additional swapfile

Tim

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

We want it to swap less for this particular operation because it is low
priority compared to the rest of what's going on inside the box.

We've considered both artificially manipulating swap on the fly similar to
your suggestion as well a parallel thread that pumps a 3 into drop_caches
every few seconds while the update is running, but these seem too much like
hacks for our liking. Mind you, if we don't have a choice we'll do what we
need to get the job done but there's a nagging voice in our conscience that
says keep looking for a more elegant solution and work *with* the kernel
rather than working against it or trying to trick it into doing what we
want. 

We've already disabled OOM so we can at least keep our testing alive while
searching for a more elegant solution. Although we want to avoid swap in
this particular instance for this particular reason, in our hearts we agree
with Andrew that swap can be your friend and get you out of a jam once in a
while. Even more, we'd like to leave OOM active if we can because we want to
be told when somebody's not being a good memory citizen.

Some background, what we've done is carve up a huge chunk of memory that is
shared between three resident processes as write cache for a proprietary
block system layout that is part of a scalable storage architecture
currently capable of RAID 0, 1, 5 (soon 6) virtualized across multiple
chassis's, essentially treating each machine as a "disk" and providing
multipath I/O to multiple iSCSI targets as part of a grid/array storage
solution. Whew! We also have a version that leverages a battery backed write
cache for higher performance at an additional cost. This software is
installable on any commodity platform with 4-N disks supported by Linux,
I've even put it on an Optiplex with 4 simulated disks. Yawn ... yet another
iSCSI storage solution, but this one scales linearly in capacity as well as
performance. As such, we have no user level apps on the boxes and precious
little disk to spare for additional swap so our version of the swap
manipulation solution is to turn swap completely off for the duration of the
update.

I hope I haven't muddied things up even more but basically what we want to
do is find a way to limit the number of cached pages for disk I/O on the OS
filesystem, even if it drastically slows down the untar and verify process
because the disk I/O we really care about is not on any of the OS
partitions.

Louis Aucoin

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Schmielau [mailto:tim@physik3.uni-rostock.de] 
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 2:47 PM
To: Aucoin
Cc: 'Andrew Morton'; torvalds@osdl.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org;
clameter@sgi.com
Subject: RE: la la la la ... swappiness

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Aucoin wrote:

> during tar extraction ... inactive pages reaches levels as high as ~375000

So why do you want the system to swap _less_? You need to find some free 
memory for the additional processes to run in, and you have lots of 
inactive pages, so I think you want to swap out _more_ pages.

I'd suggest to temporarily add a swapfile before you update your system. 
This can even help in bringing your memory use to the state before if you 
do it like this
  - swapon additional swapfile
  - update your database software
  - swapoff swap partition
  - swapon swap partition
  - swapoff additional swapfile

Tim

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Horst H. von Brand]

Aucoin <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:
> We want it to swap less for this particular operation because it is low
> priority compared to the rest of what's going on inside the box.

The swapping is not a "operation" thing, it is global for /all/ what is
going on in the box. And having it swap less means assigning it more RAM,
i.e., giving it higher (not lower) priority than other stuff happening at
the same time.

I guess I don't understand what your needs are (not what you want to do to
get there).
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile               Fax:  +56 32 2797513

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

I should also have made it clear that under a full load OOM kills critical
data moving processes because of (what appears to be) the out of control
memory consumption by disk I/O cache related to the tar.

As a side note, even now, *hours* after the tar has completed and even
though I have swappiness set to 0, cache pressure set to 9999, all dirty
timeouts set to 1 and all dirty ratios set to 1, I still have a 360+K
inactive page count and my "free" memory is less than 10% of normal. I'm not
pretending to understand what's happening here but shouldn't some kind of
expiration have kicked in by now and freed up all those inactive pages? The
*instant* I manually push a "3" into drop_caches I have 100% of my normal
free memory and the inactive page count drops below 2K. Maybe I completely
misunderstood the purpose of all those dials but I really did get the
feeling that twisting them all tight would make the housekeeping algorithms
more aggressive.

What, if anything, besides manually echoing a "3" to drop_caches will cause
all those inactive pages to be put back on the free list ?

-----Original Message-----
From: Aucoin [mailto:Aucoin@Houston.RR.com] 
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 5:57 PM
To: 'Tim Schmielau'
Cc: 'Andrew Morton'; 'torvalds@osdl.org'; 'linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org';
'clameter@sgi.com'
Subject: RE: la la la la ... swappiness

We want it to swap less for this particular operation because it is low
priority compared to the rest of what's going on inside the box.

We've considered both artificially manipulating swap on the fly similar to
your suggestion as well a parallel thread that pumps a 3 into drop_caches
every few seconds while the update is running, but these seem too much like
hacks for our liking. Mind you, if we don't have a choice we'll do what we
need to get the job done but there's a nagging voice in our conscience that
says keep looking for a more elegant solution and work *with* the kernel
rather than working against it or trying to trick it into doing what we
want. 

We've already disabled OOM so we can at least keep our testing alive while
searching for a more elegant solution. Although we want to avoid swap in
this particular instance for this particular reason, in our hearts we agree
with Andrew that swap can be your friend and get you out of a jam once in a
while. Even more, we'd like to leave OOM active if we can because we want to
be told when somebody's not being a good memory citizen.

Some background, what we've done is carve up a huge chunk of memory that is
shared between three resident processes as write cache for a proprietary
block system layout that is part of a scalable storage architecture
currently capable of RAID 0, 1, 5 (soon 6) virtualized across multiple
chassis's, essentially treating each machine as a "disk" and providing
multipath I/O to multiple iSCSI targets as part of a grid/array storage
solution. Whew! We also have a version that leverages a battery backed write
cache for higher performance at an additional cost. This software is
installable on any commodity platform with 4-N disks supported by Linux,
I've even put it on an Optiplex with 4 simulated disks. Yawn ... yet another
iSCSI storage solution, but this one scales linearly in capacity as well as
performance. As such, we have no user level apps on the boxes and precious
little disk to spare for additional swap so our version of the swap
manipulation solution is to turn swap completely off for the duration of the
update.

I hope I haven't muddied things up even more but basically what we want to
do is find a way to limit the number of cached pages for disk I/O on the OS
filesystem, even if it drastically slows down the untar and verify process
because the disk I/O we really care about is not on any of the OS
partitions.

Louis Aucoin

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Schmielau [mailto:tim@physik3.uni-rostock.de] 
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 2:47 PM
To: Aucoin
Cc: 'Andrew Morton'; torvalds@osdl.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org;
clameter@sgi.com
Subject: RE: la la la la ... swappiness

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Aucoin wrote:

> during tar extraction ... inactive pages reaches levels as high as ~375000

So why do you want the system to swap _less_? You need to find some free 
memory for the additional processes to run in, and you have lots of 
inactive pages, so I think you want to swap out _more_ pages.

I'd suggest to temporarily add a swapfile before you update your system. 
This can even help in bringing your memory use to the state before if you 
do it like this
  - swapon additional swapfile
  - update your database software
  - swapoff swap partition
  - swapon swap partition
  - swapoff additional swapfile

Tim

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Andrew Morton]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006 17:56:30 -0600
"Aucoin" <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:

> I hope I haven't muddied things up even more but basically what we want to
> do is find a way to limit the number of cached pages for disk I/O on the OS
> filesystem, even if it drastically slows down the untar and verify process
> because the disk I/O we really care about is not on any of the OS
> partitions.

Try mounting that fs with `-o sync'.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Andrew Morton]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006 19:54:41 -0600
"Aucoin" <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:

> What, if anything, besides manually echoing a "3" to drop_caches will cause
> all those inactive pages to be put back on the free list ?

There is no reason for the kernel to do that - a clean, inactive page is
immediately reclaimable on demand.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:

> On Sun, 3 Dec 2006 17:56:30 -0600
> "Aucoin" <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:
> 
> > I hope I haven't muddied things up even more but basically what we want to
> > do is find a way to limit the number of cached pages for disk I/O on the OS
> > filesystem, even if it drastically slows down the untar and verify process
> > because the disk I/O we really care about is not on any of the OS
> > partitions.
> 
> Try mounting that fs with `-o sync'.

Wouldn't it be much nicer to just lower the dirty-page limit?

	echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
	echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio

or something. Which we already discussed in another thread and almost 
already decided we should lower the values for big-mem machines..

Hmm?

		Linus

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Kyle Moffett]

On Dec 03, 2006, at 20:54:41, Aucoin wrote:
> As a side note, even now, *hours* after the tar has completed and  
> even though I have swappiness set to 0, cache pressure set to 9999,  
> all dirty timeouts set to 1 and all dirty ratios set to 1, I still  
> have a 360+K inactive page count and my "free" memory is less than  
> 10% of normal.

The point you're missing is that an "inactive" page is a free page  
that happens to have known clean data on it corresponding to  
something on disk.  If you need to use the inactive page for  
something all you have to do is either zero it or fill it with data  
from elsewhere.  There is _no_ practical reason for the kernel to  
turn an "inactive" page into a "free" page.  On my Linux systems  
after heavy local-disk and network intensive read-only load I have no  
more than 2% "free" memory, most of the rest is "inactive" (in one  
case some 2GB of it).  There's nothing _wrong_ with that much  
"inactive" memory, it just means that you were using it for data at  
one point, then didn't need it anymore and haven't reused it since.

> I'm not pretending to understand what's happening here but  
> shouldn't some kind of expiration have kicked in by now and freed  
> up all those inactive pages?

Nope; the pages will continue to contain valid data until you  
overwrite them with new data somehow.  Now, if they were "dirty"  
pages, containing unwritten data, then you would be correct.

> The *instant* I manually push a "3" into drop_caches I have 100% of  
> my normal free memory and the inactive page count drops below 2K.  
> Maybe I completely misunderstood the purpose of all those dials but  
> I really did get the feeling that twisting them all tight would  
> make the housekeeping algorithms more aggressive.

In this case you're telling the kernel to go beyond its normal  
housekeeping and delete perfectly good data from memory.  The only  
reason to do that is usually to make benchmarks mildly more  
repeatable and doing it on a regular basis tends to kill performance.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

> [copy of long previous email snipped]

PS: No need to put a copy of the entire message you are replying to  
at the end of your post, it just chews up space.  If anything please  
quote inline immediately before the appropriate portion of your reply  
so we can get the gist, much as I have done above.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Nick Piggin]

Aucoin wrote:
> We want it to swap less for this particular operation because it is low
> priority compared to the rest of what's going on inside the box.
> 
> We've considered both artificially manipulating swap on the fly similar to
> your suggestion as well a parallel thread that pumps a 3 into drop_caches
> every few seconds while the update is running, but these seem too much like
> hacks for our liking. Mind you, if we don't have a choice we'll do what we
> need to get the job done but there's a nagging voice in our conscience that
> says keep looking for a more elegant solution and work *with* the kernel
> rather than working against it or trying to trick it into doing what we
> want. 
> 
> We've already disabled OOM so we can at least keep our testing alive while
> searching for a more elegant solution. Although we want to avoid swap in
> this particular instance for this particular reason, in our hearts we agree
> with Andrew that swap can be your friend and get you out of a jam once in a
> while. Even more, we'd like to leave OOM active if we can because we want to
> be told when somebody's not being a good memory citizen.
> 
> Some background, what we've done is carve up a huge chunk of memory that is
> shared between three resident processes as write cache for a proprietary
> block system layout that is part of a scalable storage architecture
> currently capable of RAID 0, 1, 5 (soon 6) virtualized across multiple
> chassis's, essentially treating each machine as a "disk" and providing
> multipath I/O to multiple iSCSI targets as part of a grid/array storage
> solution. Whew! We also have a version that leverages a battery backed write
> cache for higher performance at an additional cost. This software is
> installable on any commodity platform with 4-N disks supported by Linux,
> I've even put it on an Optiplex with 4 simulated disks. Yawn ... yet another
> iSCSI storage solution, but this one scales linearly in capacity as well as
> performance. As such, we have no user level apps on the boxes and precious
> little disk to spare for additional swap so our version of the swap
> manipulation solution is to turn swap completely off for the duration of the
> update.
> 
> I hope I haven't muddied things up even more but basically what we want to
> do is find a way to limit the number of cached pages for disk I/O on the OS
> filesystem, even if it drastically slows down the untar and verify process
> because the disk I/O we really care about is not on any of the OS
> partitions.

Hi Louis,

We had customers see similar incorrect OOM problems, so I sent in some
patches merged after 2.6.16. Can you upgrade to latest kernel? (otherwise
I guess backporting could be an option for you).

Basically the fixes are more conservative about going OOM if the kernel
thinks it can still reclaim some pages, and also allow the kernel to swap
as a last resort, even if swappiness is set to 0.

Once your OOM problems are solved, I think that page reclaim should do a
reasonable job at evicting the right pages with your simple untar
workload.

Thanks,
Nick

-- 
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com 

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

 > PS: No need to put a copy of the entire message

Apologies for the lapse in protocol.

> The point you're missing is that an "inactive" page is a free 
> page that happens to have known clean data on it 

I understand now where the inactive page count is coming from.
I don't understand why there is no way for me to make the kernel
prefer to reclaim inactive pages before choosing swap.

> In this case you're telling the kernel to go beyond its 
> normal housekeeping and delete perfectly good data from 
> memory.  The only reason to do that is usually to make 

The definition of perfectly good here may be up for debate or
someone can explain it to me. This perfectly good data was
cached under the tar yet hours after the tar has completed the
pages are still cached.

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Nick Piggin [mailto:nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au]
> We had customers see similar incorrect OOM problems, so I sent in some
> patches merged after 2.6.16. Can you upgrade to latest kernel? (otherwise
> I guess backporting could be an option for you).

I will raise the question of moving the kernel forward one more time before
release. Can you point me to the patches you mentioned?

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Nick Piggin]

Aucoin wrote:
>>From: Nick Piggin [mailto:nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au]
>>We had customers see similar incorrect OOM problems, so I sent in some
>>patches merged after 2.6.16. Can you upgrade to latest kernel? (otherwise
>>I guess backporting could be an option for you).
> 
> 
> I will raise the question of moving the kernel forward one more time before
> release. Can you point me to the patches you mentioned?

These two are the main ones:

http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=408d85441cd5a9bd6bc851d677a10c605ed8db5f
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=4ff1ffb4870b007b86f21e5f27eeb11498c4c077

They shouldn't be too hard to backport.

I'd be interested to know how OOM and page reclaim behaves after these patches
(or with a newer kernel).

Thanks,
Nick

-- 
Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com 

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[David Lang]

I think that I am seeing two seperate issues here that are getting mixed up.

1. while doing the tar + patch the system is choosing to use memory for 
caching the tar (pushing program data out to cache).

2. after the tar has completed the data remins in the cache.

the answer for #2 is the one that is being stated in the response below, namely 
that this shouldn't matter, the memory used for the inactive cache is just as 
good as free memory (i.e. it can be used immediatly for other purposes with no 
swap needed), so the fact that it's inactive instead of free doesn't matter.

however the real problem that Aucoin is running into is #1, namely that when the 
patching process (tar, etc) kicks off the system is choosing to use it's ram as 
a cache instead of leaving it in use for the processes that are running. if he 
manually forces the system to drop it's cache (echoing 3 into drop_caches 
repeatedly during the run of the patch process) he is able to keep this under 
control.

from the documentation on swappiness it seems like setting it to 0 would do what 
he wants (tell the system not to swap out process memory to make room for more 
cache), but he's reporting that this is not working as expected.

this is the same type of problem that people run into with the nightly updatedb 
run pushing inactive programs out of ram makeing the system sluggish the next 
morning.

IIRC there is a flag that can be passed to the open that tells the system that 
the data is 'use once' and not to cache it, is it possible to do ld_preload 
tricks to force this parameter for all the programs that his patch script is 
useing?

David Lang

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Kyle Moffett wrote:

> On Dec 03, 2006, at 20:54:41, Aucoin wrote:
>> As a side note, even now, *hours* after the tar has completed and even 
>> though I have swappiness set to 0, cache pressure set to 9999, all dirty 
>> timeouts set to 1 and all dirty ratios set to 1, I still have a 360+K 
>> inactive page count and my "free" memory is less than 10% of normal.
>
> The point you're missing is that an "inactive" page is a free page that 
> happens to have known clean data on it corresponding to something on disk. 
> If you need to use the inactive page for something all you have to do is 
> either zero it or fill it with data from elsewhere.  There is _no_ practical 
> reason for the kernel to turn an "inactive" page into a "free" page.  On my 
> Linux systems after heavy local-disk and network intensive read-only load I 
> have no more than 2% "free" memory, most of the rest is "inactive" (in one 
> case some 2GB of it).  There's nothing _wrong_ with that much "inactive" 
> memory, it just means that you were using it for data at one point, then 
> didn't need it anymore and haven't reused it since.
>
>> I'm not pretending to understand what's happening here but shouldn't some 
>> kind of expiration have kicked in by now and freed up all those inactive 
>> pages?
>
> Nope; the pages will continue to contain valid data until you overwrite them 
> with new data somehow.  Now, if they were "dirty" pages, containing unwritten 
> data, then you would be correct.
>
>> The *instant* I manually push a "3" into drop_caches I have 100% of my 
>> normal free memory and the inactive page count drops below 2K. Maybe I 
>> completely misunderstood the purpose of all those dials but I really did 
>> get the feeling that twisting them all tight would make the housekeeping 
>> algorithms more aggressive.
>
> In this case you're telling the kernel to go beyond its normal housekeeping 
> and delete perfectly good data from memory.  The only reason to do that is 
> usually to make benchmarks mildly more repeatable and doing it on a regular 
> basis tends to kill performance.
>
> Cheers,
> Kyle Moffett
>
>> [copy of long previous email snipped]
>
> PS: No need to put a copy of the entire message you are replying to at the 
> end of your post, it just chews up space.  If anything please quote inline 
> immediately before the appropriate portion of your reply so we can get the 
> gist, much as I have done above.
>
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
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> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Chris Friesen]

Aucoin wrote:

> The definition of perfectly good here may be up for debate or
> someone can explain it to me. This perfectly good data was
> cached under the tar yet hours after the tar has completed the
> pages are still cached.

If nothing else has asked for that memory since the tar, there is no 
reason to evict the pages from the cache.  The inactive memory is 
basically "free, but still contains the previous data".

If anything asks for memory, those pages will be filled with zeros or 
the new information.  In the meantime, the kernel keeps them in the 
cache in case anyone wants the old information.

It doesn't hurt anything to keep the pages around with the old data in 
them--and it might help.

Chris

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Christoph Lameter]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Wouldn't it be much nicer to just lower the dirty-page limit?
> 
> 	echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
> 	echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio

Dirty ratio cannot be set to less than 5%. See 
mm/page-writeback.c:get_dirty_limits().

> or something. Which we already discussed in another thread and almost 
> already decided we should lower the values for big-mem machines..

We also have an issue with cpusets. Dirty page throttling does not work in 
a cpuset if it is relatively small to the total memory on the system since 
we calculate the percentage of the total memory and not a percentage of 
the memory the process is allowed to use.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Horst H. von Brand]

Aucoin <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:

[...]

> The definition of perfectly good here may be up for debate or
> someone can explain it to me. This perfectly good data was
> cached under the tar yet hours after the tar has completed the
> pages are still cached.

That means that there isn't a need for that memory at all (and so they stay
around; why actively delete data (using up resources!) needlessly when it
would be a win to have them around in the (admittedly remote) case they'll
be needed again?), or the whole memory handling in Linux is very broken.
I'd vote for the former, i.e., your problems have nothing to do with memory
pressure and swapping. That would explain why your maneuvres didn't make a
difference...

In any case, how do you know it is the tar data that stays around, and not
just that the number of pages "in use" stays roughly constant?

Please explain again:

- What you are doing, step by step
- What are your exact requirements
- In what exact way is it missbehaving. Please tell /in detail/ how you
  determine the real behaviour, not your deductions.

[Yes, I'm in my "dense" day today.]
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile               Fax:  +56 32 2797513

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: David Lang [mailto:dlang@digitalinsight.com]
> I think that I am seeing two seperate issues here that are getting mixed
> up.

Fair enough.

> however the real problem that Aucoin is running into is patching process
> (tar, etc) kicks off the system is choosing to use it's

First name Louis, yes but we haven't resorted to echoing 3 in a loop at
drop_caches yet.

> from the documentation on swappiness it seems like setting it to 0 would
> do what he wants

That's what I thought, but some responses would seem to indicate that these
two "types" of memory are completely independent of each other and
swappiness has no impact on the type that is currently annoying me. It just
doesn't seem like a fair way to run a kernel when you have a dial dial to
control swappiness but then there's this rogue memory consumption that lives
outside the control of the swappiness dial and you end up swapping anyway.

> this is the same type of problem that people run into with the nightly
> updatedb

I would imagine so, yes. But take that example and instead of programs going
in active over night substitute programs that go inactive for only a few
seconds ... swap thrash, oom-killer, game over.

> IIRC there is a flag that can be passed to the open that tells the system
> that

I'll check into it.

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Horst H. von Brand [mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl]
> That means that there isn't a need for that memory at all (and so they

In the current isolated non-production, not actually bearing a load test
case yes. But if I can't get it to not swap on an idle system I have no hope
of avoiding OOM on a loaded system.

> In any case, how do you know it is the tar data that stays around, and not
> just that the number of pages "in use" stays roughly constant?

I'm not dumping the contents of memory so I don't.

> - What you are doing, step by step

Trying to deliver a high availability, linearly scalable, clustered iSCSI
storage solution that can be upgraded with minimum downtime.

> - What are your exact requirements

OOM not to kill anything.

> - In what exact way is it missbehaving. Please tell /in detail/ how you

OOM kills important stuff.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Andrew Morton]

On Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:07:22 -0300
"Horst H. von Brand" <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl> wrote:

> Please explain again:
> 
> - What you are doing, step by step

That 2GB machine apparently has a 1.6GB shm segment which is mlocked.  That will
cause the VM to do one heck of a lot of pointless scanning and could, I guess,
cause false oom decisions.  It's also an ia32 highmem machine, which adds to the
fun.

We could scan more:

--- a/mm/vmscan.c~a
+++ a/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -918,6 +918,7 @@ static unsigned long shrink_zone(int pri
 	 * slowly sift through the active list.
 	 */
 	zone->nr_scan_active += (zone->nr_active >> priority) + 1;
+	zone->nr_scan_active *= 2;
 	nr_active = zone->nr_scan_active;
 	if (nr_active >= sc->swap_cluster_max)
 		zone->nr_scan_active = 0;
@@ -925,6 +926,7 @@ static unsigned long shrink_zone(int pri
 		nr_active = 0;
 
 	zone->nr_scan_inactive += (zone->nr_inactive >> priority) + 1;
+	zone->nr_scan_inactive *= 2;
 	nr_inactive = zone->nr_scan_inactive;
 	if (nr_inactive >= sc->swap_cluster_max)
 		zone->nr_scan_inactive = 0;
_

but that's rather dumb.  Better would be to remove mlocked pages from the
LRU.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Christoph Lameter]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:

> but that's rather dumb.  Better would be to remove mlocked pages from the
> LRU.

Could we generalize the removal of sections of a zone from the LRU? I 
believe this would help various buffer allocation schemes. We have some 
issues with heavy LRU scans if large buffers are allocated on some 
nodes.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Jeffrey Hundstad]

Hello,

Please forgive me if this is naive.  It seems that you could recompile 
your tar and patch commands to use the POSIX_FADVISE(2) feature with the 
POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE flags.  It seems these would cause the tar and patch 
commands to not clutter the page cache at all.

It'd be nice to be able to make a wrapper out of this kind of like the 
fakeroot(1) command like such as:

nocachesuck tar xvfz kernel.tar.gz

ya know what I mean?

-- 
Jeffrey Hundstad

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Tim Schmielau]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Aucoin wrote:

> > From: Horst H. von Brand [mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl]
> > That means that there isn't a need for that memory at all (and so they
> 
> In the current isolated non-production, not actually bearing a load test
> case yes. But if I can't get it to not swap on an idle system I have no hope
> of avoiding OOM on a loaded system.

I don't think that assumption is correct. If you have no load on your 
system and the pages in the shared application cache are not actually 
touched, it is perfectly reasonable for the kernel to push out these 
unused pages to swap space to have even more RAM available (e.g. for 
caching the pages more recently accessed by the tar and patch commands). 

I believe your OOM problem is not connected to these observations. There 
might be a problem in the handling of OOM situations in Linux. But before 
coming to that conclusion, I would suggest trying your simulated software 
upgrade scenario with plenty of swap space available and without playing
any tricks with MM settings.

Tim

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Horst H. von Brand]

Aucoin <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:
> From: Horst H. von Brand [mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl]
> > That means that there isn't a need for that memory at all (and so they

> In the current isolated non-production, not actually bearing a load test
> case yes. But if I can't get it to not swap on an idle system I have no hope
> of avoiding OOM on a loaded system.

How do you /know/ it won't just be recycled in the production case?

> > In any case, how do you know it is the tar data that stays around, and not
> > just that the number of pages "in use" stays roughly constant?
> 
> I'm not dumping the contents of memory so I don't.

OK.

> > - What you are doing, step by step
> 
> Trying to deliver a high availability, linearly scalable, clustered iSCSI
> storage solution that can be upgraded with minimum downtime.

That is your ultimate goal, not what you are doing, step by step.

> > - What are your exact requirements

> OOM not to kill anything.

Can't ever guarantee that (unless you have the exact memory requirements
beforehand, and enough RAM for the worst case).

> > - In what exact way is it missbehaving. Please tell /in detail/ how you

> OOM kills important stuff.

What "important stuff"? How come OOM kills it, when there is plenty of
free(able) memory around? Is this in the production setting, or are you
just afraid it could happen by what you see in the "current isolated
non-production, not actually bearing a load test" case?
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile               Fax:  +56 32 2797513

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Al Boldi]

As a workaround try this:

echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio

Hopefully someone can fix this intrinsic swap before drop behaviour.


Thanks!

--
Al

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Jeffrey Hundstad [mailto:jeffrey.hundstad@mnsu.edu]
> POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE flags.  It seems these would cause the tar and patch

WI may be naïve as well, but that sounds interesting. Unless someone knows
of an obvious reason this won't work we can make a one-off tar command and
give it a whirl.

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Tim Schmielau [mailto:tim@physik3.uni-rostock.de]
> I believe your OOM problem is not connected to these observations. There

I don't know what to tell you except oom fires only when the update runs. I
know it's a pitiful datapoint so I'll work on getting more data.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Andrew Morton]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006 15:25:47 -0600
"Aucoin" <Aucoin@Houston.RR.com> wrote:

> > From: Jeffrey Hundstad [mailto:jeffrey.hundstad@mnsu.edu]
> > POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE flags.  It seems these would cause the tar and patch
> 
> WI may be na__ve as well, but that sounds interesting. Unless someone knows
> of an obvious reason this won't work we can make a one-off tar command and
> give it a whirl.
> 

Well if altering tar is an option then sure, a
sync_file_range(SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE|SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WAIT_AFTER) followed
by fadvise(POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) will free the memory up again.

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Horst H. von Brand [mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl]
> How do you /know/ it won't just be recycled in the production case?

In the production case is when oom fires and kills things. I can only assume
memory is not being freed fast enough otherwise oom wouldn't get so upset.

> That is your ultimate goal, not what you are doing, step by step.

It's 1/2+ million lines of code, there are a lot of steps. Other than saying
we create a 1.6GB shared memory segment up front, then load the high
availability iSCSI application, start I/O with some number of clients and
then launch an update. I'm not sure what detail you're looking for. Linus
seems to have the best summary of the problem so far saying that we have a
2GB system with 1.6GB dedicated and we want the OS to pretend there's only
400MB of memory.

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Nick Piggin [mailto:nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au]
> I'd be interested to know how OOM and page reclaim behaves after these
> patches
> (or with a newer kernel).

We didn't get far today. The various suggestions everyone has for solving
this problem spurred several new discussions inside the office and raised
more questions. At the heart of the problem Andrew is right, heavy handed
tactics to force limits on page cache don't solve anything and may just
squeeze the problem to new areas. Modifying tar is really a band aid and not
a solution, there is still a fundamental problem with memory management in
this setup.

Nick suggested the possibility of a patching the kernel or upgrading to a
new kernel. Linus made the suggestion of dialing the value of
min_free_kbytes down to match something more in line with what might be
expected in a system with 400MB memory as a way to possibly make VM or at
least a portion of VM simulate a restricted amount of memory. And, I have
seen a couple suggestions about creating a new proc vm file to do things
like tweak max_buffer_heads dynamically.

So here's a silly (crazy) question (or two).

If I'm going to go through all the trouble to change the kernel and maybe
create a new proc file how much code would I have to touch to create a proc
file to set something like, let's say, effective memory and have all the vm
calculations use effective memory as the basis for swap and cache
calculations? And can I stop at the vm engine or does the sprawl farther
out? To the untrained mind it seems like this might be the best of both
worlds. It sounds like it would allow an embedded system like ours to set
aside a chunk of ram for a special purpose and designate a sandbox for the
OS. I am, of course, making the *bold* assumption here that a majority of
the vm algorithms are based off something remotely similar to a value which
represents physical memory.

Thoughts? Stones?

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Aucoin wrote:
>
> If I'm going to go through all the trouble to change the kernel and maybe
> create a new proc file how much code would I have to touch to create a proc
> file to set something like, let's say, effective memory and have all the vm
> calculations use effective memory as the basis for swap and cache
> calculations?

Considering your /proc/meminfo under load:

	MemTotal:      2075152 kB
	MemFree:        169848 kB
	Buffers:          4360 kB
	Cached:         334824 kB
	SwapCached:          0 kB
	Active:         178692 kB
	Inactive:       271452 kB
	HighTotal:     1179392 kB
	HighFree:         3040 kB
	LowTotal:       895760 kB
	LowFree:        499876 kB
	SwapTotal:      524276 kB
	SwapFree:       524276 kB
	Dirty:               0 kB
	Writeback:           0 kB
	Mapped:         116720 kB
	Slab:            27956 kB
	..

I actually suspect you should be _fairly_ close to such a situation 
already. In particular, the Active and Inactive lists really are fairly 
small, and don't contain the big SHM area, they seem to be just the cache 
and some (a fairly small amount of) anonymous pages.

The above actually confuses me mightily. I _really_ expected the SHM pages 
to show up on the active/inactive lists if it was actually SHM, and they 
don't seem to. What am I missing?

Louis, exactly how do you allocate that big 1.6GB shared area? 

			Linus

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Linus Torvalds [mailto:torvalds@osdl.org]
> I actually suspect you should be _fairly_ close to such a situation

We run with min_free_kbytes set around 4k to answer your earlier question.

> Louis, exactly how do you allocate that big 1.6GB shared area?

Ummm, shm_open, ftruncate, mmap ? Is it a trick question ? The process
responsible for initially setting up the shared area doesn't stay resident.

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Nick Piggin]

Aucoin wrote:
>>From: Linus Torvalds [mailto:torvalds@osdl.org]
>>I actually suspect you should be _fairly_ close to such a situation
> 
> 
> We run with min_free_kbytes set around 4k to answer your earlier question.
> 
> 
>>Louis, exactly how do you allocate that big 1.6GB shared area?
> 
> 
> Ummm, shm_open, ftruncate, mmap ? Is it a trick question ? The process
> responsible for initially setting up the shared area doesn't stay resident.

The issue is that the shm pages should show up in the active and
inactive lists. But they aren't, and you seem to have about 1542524K
unacconted for. Weird.

Can you try getting the output of /proc/vmstat as well?

-- 
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com 

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Rene Herman]

Nick Piggin wrote:

> Aucoin wrote:

>> Ummm, shm_open, ftruncate, mmap ? Is it a trick question ? The process
>> responsible for initially setting up the shared area doesn't stay 
>> resident.
> 
> The issue is that the shm pages should show up in the active and
> inactive lists. But they aren't, and you seem to have about 1542524K
> unacconted for. Weird.
> 
> Can you try getting the output of /proc/vmstat as well?

Haven't followed along on this thread, but couldn't help notice the 
ftruncate there and some similarity to a problem I once experienced 
myself. Is ext3 involved? If so, maybe:

http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-mm/2002-11/msg00110.html

is still or again being annoying?

Rene.

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Nick Piggin [mailto:nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au]
> Can you try getting the output of /proc/vmstat as well?

Ouput from vmstat, meminfo and bloatmon below.

vmstat
nr_dirty 0
nr_writeback 0
nr_unstable 0
nr_page_table_pages 361
nr_mapped 33077
nr_slab 8107
pgpgin 1433195947
pgpgout 148795046
pswpin 0
pswpout 1
pgalloc_high 19333815
pgalloc_normal 38376025
pgalloc_dma32 0
pgalloc_dma 1043219
pgfree 58768398
pgactivate 99313
pgdeactivate 61910
pgfault 248450153
pgmajfault 1009
pgrefill_high 18587
pgrefill_normal 129658
pgrefill_dma32 0
pgrefill_dma 6299
pgsteal_high 11954
pgsteal_normal 197484
pgsteal_dma32 0
pgsteal_dma 6176
pgscan_kswapd_high 13035
pgscan_kswapd_normal 205326
pgscan_kswapd_dma32 0
pgscan_kswapd_dma 6369
pgscan_direct_high 0
pgscan_direct_normal 0
pgscan_direct_dma32 0
pgscan_direct_dma 0
pginodesteal 0
slabs_scanned 24576
kswapd_steal 215614
kswapd_inodesteal 0
pageoutrun 3315
allocstall 0
pgrotated 1
nr_bounce 0

meminfo 
MemTotal:      2075152 kB
MemFree:         59052 kB
Buffers:         45088 kB
Cached:         401128 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         246424 kB
Inactive:       313332 kB
HighTotal:     1179392 kB
HighFree:         1696 kB
LowTotal:       895760 kB
LowFree:         57356 kB
SwapTotal:      524276 kB
SwapFree:       524272 kB
Dirty:               4 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:         132252 kB
Slab:            32432 kB
CommitLimit:    855292 kB
Committed_AS:   980948 kB
PageTables:       1432 kB
VmallocTotal:   114680 kB
VmallocUsed:      1000 kB
VmallocChunk:   113584 kB
HugePages_Total:   345
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB

bloatmon
skbuff_fclone_cache:       22KB       22KB  100.0
reiser_inode_cache:        0KB        0KB  100.0
posix_timers_cache:        0KB        0KB  100.0
mqueue_inode_cache:       60KB       63KB   95.9
inotify_watch_cache:        0KB        3KB   14.85
inotify_event_cache:        0KB        0KB  100.0
hugetlbfs_inode_cache:        1KB        3KB   27.27
 skbuff_head_cache:     2082KB     2100KB   99.14
 shmem_inode_cache:        5KB       11KB   48.14
 isofs_inode_cache:        0KB        0KB  100.0
  sock_inode_cache:       21KB       26KB   82.85
  size-131072(DMA):        0KB        0KB  100.0
  request_sock_TCP:        0KB        0KB  100.0
  proc_inode_cache:       18KB       38KB   48.18
  ext3_inode_cache:      314KB      375KB   83.85
  ext2_inode_cache:       11KB       30KB   37.50
   tcp_bind_bucket:        0KB        3KB    3.94
   sysfs_dir_cache:       85KB       86KB  100.0
   size-65536(DMA):        0KB        0KB  100.0
   size-32768(DMA):        0KB        0KB  100.0
   size-16384(DMA):        0KB        0KB  100.0
   scsi_io_context:        0KB        0KB  100.0

RE: la la la la ... swappiness

[Aucoin]

> From: Rene Herman [mailto:rene.herman@gmail.com]
> ftruncate there and some similarity to a problem I once experienced

I can't honestly say I completely grasp the fundamentals of the issue you
experienced but we are using ext3 with data=journal

Re: la la la la ... swappiness

[Rene Herman]

Aucoin wrote:

>> From: Rene Herman [mailto:rene.herman@gmail.com] ftruncate there
>> and some similarity to a problem I once experienced
> 
> I can't honestly say I completely grasp the fundamentals of the issue
> you experienced but we are using ext3 with data=journal

Rereading I see ext3 isn't involved at all but perhaps the ftruncate 
does something similar here as it did on ext3? Andrew? It's probably 
best to igniore me, I also never quite understood what the problem on 
ext3 was. Just thought I'd share the hunch anyway...

Rene.