From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757661Ab3BRXtO (ORCPT ); Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:49:14 -0500 Received: from aserp1040.oracle.com ([141.146.126.69]:45892 "EHLO aserp1040.oracle.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757560Ab3BRXtN convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:49:13 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:48:47 -0800 (PST) From: Dan Magenheimer To: Seth Jennings , Ric Mason Cc: Minchan Kim , Greg Kroah-Hartman , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton , Nitin Gupta , Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk Subject: RE: [PATCH] zsmalloc: Add Kconfig for enabling PTE method References: <1359937421-19921-1-git-send-email-minchan@kernel.org> <511F2721.2000305@gmail.com> <512271E1.9000105@linux.vnet.ibm.com> In-Reply-To: <512271E1.9000105@linux.vnet.ibm.com> X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Oracle Beehive Extensions for Outlook 2.0.1.7 (607090) [OL 12.0.6665.5003 (x86)] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT X-Source-IP: ucsinet22.oracle.com [156.151.31.94] Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > From: Seth Jennings [mailto:sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com] > Subject: Re: [PATCH] zsmalloc: Add Kconfig for enabling PTE method > > On 02/16/2013 12:28 AM, Ric Mason wrote: > > On 02/04/2013 08:23 AM, Minchan Kim wrote: > >> + for object mapping. You can check speed with zsmalloc > >> benchmark[1]. > >> + [1] https://github.com/spartacus06/zsmalloc > > > > Is there benchmark to test zcache? eg. internal fragmentation level ... > > First, zsmalloc is not used in zcache right now so just wanted to say > that. It is used in zram and the proposed zswap > (https://lwn.net/Articles/528817/) > > There is not an official benchmark. However anything that generates > activity that will hit the frontswap or cleancache hooks will do. > These are workloads that overcommit memory and use swap, or access > file sets whose size is larger that the system page cache. I think it's important to note that the question "is there a benchmark" is a very deep and difficult question for any compression solution because it is so workload-dependent. Unlike many benchmarks that simply synthesize a _quantity_ of data, zcache/zswap/zram all are very sensitive to the actual contents of that data as the compression ratio varies widely depending on the data. So we need to ensure that the data used by any benchmark has similar "entropy" to real world workloads. I'm not sure how we can do that. So it may or may not be useful to measure zcache/zswap/zram using standard benchmarks (including things like SPECjbb). At least kernbench is something that kernel developers do every day, so it is definitely a real world workload... but adding parallel compiles (via "make -jN") until the system thrashes, and then showing zcache/zswap/zram reduces the thrashing may not be at all representative of a broad range of workloads that cause memory pressure... kernbench is just convenient for us developers to demonstrate that the mechanism works. Ideas welcome... well-thought out ideas anyway! Dan