Re: [-stable 3.8.1 performance regression] madvise POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:13:57 -0400 Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> CCing lkml on this,
> 
> * Yannick Brosseau (yannick.brosseau@gmail.com) wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > We discovered a performance regression in recent kernels with LTTng
> > related to the use of fadvise DONTNEED.
> > A call to this syscall is present in the LTTng consumer.
> > 
> > The following kernel commit cause the call to fadvise to be sometime
> > really slower.
> > 
> > Kernel commit info:
> > mm/fadvise.c: drain all pagevecs if POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED fails to discard
> > all pages
> > main tree: (since 3.9-rc1)
> > commit 67d46b296a1ba1477c0df8ff3bc5e0167a0b0732
> > stable tree: (since 3.8.1)
> > https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/commit?id=bb01afe62feca1e7cdca60696f8b074416b0910d
> > 
> > On the workload test, we observe that the call to fadvise takes about
> > 4-5 us before this patch is applied. After applying the patch, The
> > syscall now takes values from 5 us up to 4 ms (4000 us) sometime. The
> > effect on lttng is that the consumer is frozen for this long period
> > which leads to dropped event in the trace.

That change wasn't terribly efficient - if there are any unpopulated
pages in the range (which is quite likely), fadvise() will now always
call invalidate_mapping_pages() a second time.

Perhaps this is fixable.  Say, make lru_add_drain_all() return a
success code, or even teach lru_add_drain_all() to return a code
indicating that one of the spilled pages was (or might have been) on a
particular mapping.


But I don't see why that would cause fadvise(POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) to
sometimes take four milliseconds(!).  Is it possible that a context
switch is now occurring, so the fadvise()-calling task sometimes spends
a few milliseconds asleep?


> We use POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED in LTTng so the kernel know it's not useful
> to keep the trace data around after it is flushed to disk. From what I
> gather from the commit changelog, it seems that the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED
> operation now touches kernel data structures shared amongst processors
> that have much higher contention/overhead than previously.
> 
> How does your page cache memory usage behave prior/after this kernel
> commit ?
> 
> Also, can you try instrumenting the "count", "start_index" and
> "end_index" values within fadvise64_64 with commit
> 67d46b296a1ba1477c0df8ff3bc5e0167a0b0732 applied and log this though
> LTTng ? This will tell us whether the lru_add_drain_all() hit is taken
> for a good reason, or due to an unforeseen off-by-one type of issue in
> the new test:
> 
>   if (count < (end_index - start_index + 1)) {
>