[PATCH rfc 0/4] percpu: partial chunk depopulation

Roman Gushchin
2021-03-24T19:07:35Z

In our production experience the percpu memory allocator is sometimes struggling
with returning the memory to the system. A typical example is a creation of
several thousands memory cgroups (each has several chunks of the percpu data
used for vmstats, vmevents, ref counters etc). Deletion and complete releasing
of these cgroups doesn't always lead to a shrinkage of the percpu memory.

The underlying problem is the fragmentation: to release an underlying chunk
all percpu allocations should be released first. The percpu allocator tends
to top up chunks to improve the utilization. It means new small-ish allocations
(e.g. percpu ref counters) are placed onto almost filled old-ish chunks,
effectively pinning them in memory.

This patchset pretends to solve this problem by implementing a partial
depopulation of percpu chunks: chunks with many empty pages are being
asynchronously depopulated and the pages are returned to the system.

To illustrate the problem the following script can be used:

--
#!/bin/bash

cd /sys/fs/cgroup

mkdir percpu_test
echo "+memory" > percpu_test/cgroup.subtree_control

cat /proc/meminfo | grep Percpu

for i in `seq 1 1000`; do
mkdir percpu_test/cg_"${i}"
for j in `seq 1 10`; do
mkdir percpu_test/cg_"${i}"_"${j}"
done
done

cat /proc/meminfo | grep Percpu

for i in `seq 1 1000`; do
for j in `seq 1 10`; do
rmdir percpu_test/cg_"${i}"_"${j}"
done
done

sleep 10

cat /proc/meminfo | grep Percpu

for i in `seq 1 1000`; do
rmdir percpu_test/cg_"${i}"
done

rmdir percpu_test
--

It creates 11000 memory cgroups and removes every 10 out of 11.
It prints the initial size of the percpu memory, the size after
creating all cgroups and the size after deleting most of them.

Results:
vanilla:
$ ./percpu_test.sh
Percpu: 7296 kB
Percpu: 481024 kB
Percpu: 481024 kB

with this patchset applied:
./percpu_test.sh
Percpu: 7488 kB
Percpu: 481152 kB
Percpu: 153920 kB

So the total size of the percpu memory was reduced by ~3 times.

Roman Gushchin (4):
percpu: implement partial chunk depopulation
percpu: split __pcpu_balance_workfn()
percpu: on demand chunk depopulation
percpu: fix a comment about the chunks ordering

mm/percpu-internal.h | 1 +
mm/percpu.c | 242 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
2 files changed, 203 insertions(+), 40 deletions(-)

--
2.30.2