Re: [RFC PATCH] mm, memcg: introduce memory.high.throttle

Waiman Long
2025-01-30T17:19:45Z

On 1/30/25 12:05 PM, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 10:05:34AM -0500, Waiman Long wrote:
>> On 1/30/25 3:15 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>> On Wed 29-01-25 14:12:04, Waiman Long wrote:
>>>> Since commit 0e4b01df8659 ("mm, memcg: throttle allocators when failing
>>>> reclaim over memory.high"), the amount of allocator throttling had
>>>> increased substantially. As a result, it could be difficult for a
>>>> misbehaving application that consumes increasing amount of memory from
>>>> being OOM-killed if memory.high is set. Instead, the application may
>>>> just be crawling along holding close to the allowed memory.high memory
>>>> for the current memory cgroup for a very long time especially those
>>>> that do a lot of memcg charging and uncharging operations.
>>>>
>>>> This behavior makes the upstream Kubernetes community hesitate to
>>>> use memory.high. Instead, they use only memory.max for memory control
>>>> similar to what is being done for cgroup v1 [1].
>>> Why is this a problem for them?
>> My understanding is that a mishaving container will hold up memory.high
>> amount of memory for a long time instead of getting OOM killed sooner and be
>> more productively used elsewhere.
>>>> To allow better control of the amount of throttling and hence the
>>>> speed that a misbehving task can be OOM killed, a new single-value
>>>> memory.high.throttle control file is now added. The allowable range
>>>> is 0-32. By default, it has a value of 0 which means maximum throttling
>>>> like before. Any non-zero positive value represents the corresponding
>>>> power of 2 reduction of throttling and makes OOM kills easier to happen.
>>> I do not like the interface to be honest. It exposes an implementation
>>> detail and casts it into a user API. If we ever need to change the way
>>> how the throttling is implemented this will stand in the way because
>>> there will be applications depending on a behavior they were carefuly
>>> tuned to.
>>>
>>> It is also not entirely sure how is this supposed to be used in
>>> practice? How do people what kind of value they should use?
>> Yes, I agree that a user may need to run some trial runs to find a proper
>> value. Perhaps a simpler binary interface of "off" and "on" may be easier to
>> understand and use.
>>>> System administrators can now use this parameter to determine how easy
>>>> they want OOM kills to happen for applications that tend to consume
>>>> a lot of memory without the need to run a special userspace memory
>>>> management tool to monitor memory consumption when memory.high is set.
>>> Why cannot they achieve the same with the existing events/metrics we
>>> already do provide? Most notably PSI which is properly accounted when
>>> a task is throttled due to memory.high throttling.
>> That will require the use of a userspace management agent that looks for
>> these stalling conditions and make the kill, if necessary. There are
>> certainly users out there that want to get some benefit of using memory.high
>> like early memory reclaim without the trouble of handling these kind of
>> stalling conditions.
> So you basically want to force the workload into some sort of a proactive
> reclaim but without an artificial slow down?
> It makes some sense to me, but
> 1) Idk if it deserves a new API, because it can be relatively easy implemented
> in userspace by a daemon which monitors cgroups usage and reclaims the memory
> if necessarily. No kernel changes are needed.
> 2) If new API is introduced, I think it's better to introduce a new limit,
> e.g. memory.target, keeping memory.high semantics intact.

Yes, you are right about that. Introducing a new "memory.target" without
disturbing the existing "memory.high" semantics will work for me too.

Cheers,
Longman