Commit 4167e9b2cf ("mm: remove GFP_THISNODE") removed the GFP_THISNODE
flag combination due to confusing semantics. It noted that
alloc_misplaced_dst_page() was one such user after changes made by
commit e97ca8e5b8 ("mm: fix GFP_THISNODE callers and clarify").
Unfortunately when GFP_THISNODE was removed, users of
alloc_misplaced_dst_page() started waking kswapd and entering direct
reclaim because the wrong GFP flags are cleared. The consequence is
that workloads that used to fit into memory now get reclaimed which is
addressed by this patch.
The problem can be demonstrated with "mutilate" that exercises memcached
which is software dedicated to memory object caching. The configuration
uses 80% of memory and is run 3 times for varying numbers of clients.
The results on a 4-socket NUMA box are
mutilate
4.4.0 4.4.0
vanilla numaswap-v1
Hmean 1 8394.71 ( 0.00%) 8395.32 ( 0.01%)
Hmean 4 30024.62 ( 0.00%) 34513.54 ( 14.95%)
Hmean 7 32821.08 ( 0.00%) 70542.96 (114.93%)
Hmean 12 55229.67 ( 0.00%) 93866.34 ( 69.96%)
Hmean 21 39438.96 ( 0.00%) 85749.21 (117.42%)
Hmean 30 37796.10 ( 0.00%) 50231.49 ( 32.90%)
Hmean 47 18070.91 ( 0.00%) 38530.13 (113.22%)
The metric is queries/second with the more the better. The results are
way outside of the noise and the reason for the improvement is obvious
from some of the vmstats
4.4.0 4.4.0
vanillanumaswap-v1r1
Minor Faults 1929399272 2146148218
Major Faults 19746529 3567
Swap Ins 57307366 9913
Swap Outs 50623229 17094
Allocation stalls 35909 443
DMA allocs 0 0
DMA32 allocs 72976349 170567396
Normal allocs 5306640898 5310651252
Movable allocs 0 0
Direct pages scanned 404130893 799577
Kswapd pages scanned 160230174 0
Kswapd pages reclaimed 55928786 0
Direct pages reclaimed 1843936 41921
Page writes file 2391 0
Page writes anon 50623229 17094
The vanilla kernel is swapping like crazy with large amounts of direct
reclaim and kswapd activity. The figures are aggregate but it's known
that the bad activity is throughout the entire test.
Note that simple streaming anon/file memory consumers also see this
problem but it's not as obvious. In those cases, kswapd is awake when
it should not be.
As there are at least two reclaim-related bugs out there, it's worth
spelling out the user-visible impact. This patch only addresses bugs
related to excessive reclaim on NUMA hardware when the working set is
larger than a NUMA node. There is a bug related to high kswapd CPU
usage but the reports are against laptops and other UMA hardware and is
not addressed by this patch.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> [4.1+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
8479eba778